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Introduction

Scientists’ roles in society include identifying important topics of study, undertaking an investigation of those topics, and disseminating their findings broadly. The scientific enterprise is largely self-governing: scientists act as peer reviewers on papers and grants, comprise hiring committees in academia, make tenure decisions, and select which applicants will be admitted to doctoral programs. A lack of diversity in science could lead to pernicious biases that hamper the extent to which scientific findings are relevant to minoritized communities. -Furthermore, even though minoritized groups innovate at higher rates, their novel contributions are discounted (Hofstra et al., 2020). +Furthermore, even though minoritized groups innovate at higher rates, their novel contributions are discounted (Hofstra et al., 2020). One first step to address this systemic issue is to directly examine peer recognition in different scientific fields.

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Gender bias among conference speakers has been recognized as an area that can be improved with targeted interventions (Klein et al., 2017; Langin, 2019; Martin, 2015, 2014). -Having more female organizers on conference committees is associated with having more female speakers (Casadevall and Handelsman, 2014). -At medical conferences in the US and Canada, the proportion of female speakers is increasing at a modest rate (Ruzycki et al., 2019). -Gender bias appears to also influence funding decisions: an examination of scoring of proposals in Canada found that reviewers asked to assess the science produced a smaller gender gap in scoring than reviewers asked to assess the applicant (Witteman et al., 2019).

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Challenges extend beyond gender: an analysis of awards at the NIH found that proposals by Asian, black or African-American applicants were less likely to be funded than those by White applicants (Ginther et al., 2011). -There are also potential interaction effects between gender and race or ethnicity that may particularly affect women of color’s efforts to gain NIH funding (Ginther et al., 2016). -Another recent analysis found that minority scientists tend to apply for awards on topics with lower success rates (Hoppe et al., 2019). +

Gender bias among conference speakers has been recognized as an area that can be improved with targeted interventions (Klein et al., 2017; Langin, 2019; Martin, 2015; Martin, 2014). +Having more female organizers on conference committees is associated with having more female speakers (Casadevall and Handelsman, 2014). +At medical conferences in the US and Canada, the proportion of female speakers is increasing at a modest rate (Ruzycki et al., 2019). +Gender bias appears to also influence funding decisions: an examination of scoring of proposals in Canada found that reviewers asked to assess the science produced a smaller gender gap in scoring than reviewers asked to assess the applicant (Witteman et al., 2019).

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Challenges extend beyond gender: an analysis of awards at the NIH found that proposals by Asian, black or African-American applicants were less likely to be funded than those by White applicants (Ginther et al., 2011). +There are also potential interaction effects between gender and race or ethnicity that may particularly affect women of color’s efforts to gain NIH funding (Ginther et al., 2016). +Another recent analysis found that minority scientists tend to apply for awards on topics with lower success rates (Hoppe et al., 2019). This finding might be the result of minority scientists selecting topics in more poorly funded areas. Alternatively, reviewing scientists may not recognize the scientific importance of these topics, which may be of particular interest to minority scientists.

We sought to understand the extent to which honors and high-profile speaking invitations were distributed equitably among gender and name origin groups by an international society and its associated meetings. @@ -232,11 +251,11 @@

Defining metrics and a Our findings across different combinations of the above choices were consistent with respect to the broad conclusions, though the numerical results differed (see Methods).

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Figure 1: Study framework. We extracted full names and affiliations of the last authors of 176,110 computational biology PubMed articles and those of 412 honorees. We estimated the gender, name-origin group and country of affiliation of each scientist and compared the probability values between these two groups (see Methods).
+Figure 1: Study framework. We extracted full names and affiliations of the last authors of 176,110 computational biology PubMed articles and those of 412 honorees. We estimated the gender, name-origin group and country of affiliation of each scientist and compared the probability values between these two groups (see Methods).

Similar gender proportion between ISCB’s honorees and the field

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We predicted the gender of honorees and authors using the https://genderize.io API, which was trained on over 100 million name-gender pairings collected from the web (see the STAR Methods for more details) and is one of the three widely-used gender inference services (Santamaría and Mihaljević, 2018). +

We predicted the gender of honorees and authors using the https://genderize.io API, which was trained on over 100 million name-gender pairings collected from the web (see the STAR Methods for more details) and is one of the three widely-used gender inference services (Santamaría and Mihaljević, 2018). The predictions represent the estimated probability of an honoree or author being male or female based on their first name; we did not convert probabilities to a hard group assignment. For example, a query to https://genderize.io on January 26, 2020 for “Casey” returns a probability of male of 0.74 and a probability of female of 0.26, which we would add for an author with this first name. Because of technical limitations, our analysis only considered two binary gender categories, and we used “male” and “female” to refer to the gender of the scientists. @@ -250,7 +269,7 @@

Similar Interaction terms did not predict the group of scientists over and above the main effect of gender probability and year.

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Figure 2: Estimated composition of gender prediction over the years of +Figure 2: Estimated composition of gender prediction over the years of all PubMed computational biology and bioinformatics journal authorships (left), and all ISCB honors (right). Male proportion (yellow) was computed as the average of the probability of being male of last authors (weight accordingly) or ISCB honorees each year. Female proportion (blue) was the complement of the male proportion. ISCB honors appear to have similar gender proportions compared to that of PubMed authorships.