David Eisner
President, The Physiological Society

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.110.6

There is much discussion about issues relating to diversity in science, and many of these ideas are relevant to our subject and Society. One important area concerns gender and the extent to which our activities should consider this. The Physiological Society was founded in 1876 and, in keeping with the customs of the time when, for example, women could not vote, membership was restricted to men. Women were finally admitted as members
in 1915 but it will have taken more than a century before, at this year’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in September, Bridget Lumb will become the first female President. As far as our journals are concerned, we had to wait until 2012 for our first female Editor-in-Chief when Sue Wray established Physiological Reports. The Journal of Physiology existed for 140 years before Kim Barrett became its first ever female Editor-in-Chief in 2016.
The Physiological Society is committed to taking account of Equality and Diversity issues and this area is championed by Sue Deuchars and Rachel Tribe.

Some issues are still, however, unresolved, and an important one is the extent to which female speakers participate in meetings. Today, many organisations, The Society included, require some kind of gender balance in scientific programmes. There are many arguments for this; not only on grounds of justice but also the need to provide role models for women at the start of their careers. A more difficult question is, in quantitative terms, what is meant by ‘balance’? Should it reflect the gender balance of researchers in the field? This balance changes with age, with a female majority at PhD student level declining to a minority as people progress through the ‘leaky pipeline’. Looking at The Society’s membership, 50% of the under 40s are female whereas only 16% of the over 60s are. Another indication of this comes from looking at those researchers awarded grants. Figures from the Medical Research Council from 2016/2017 show that women received 35% of grants. Again, the effect of career stage is obvious with women obtaining 46% of New Investigator Grants but only 18% of programme grants. Depending on the sort of talk being considered, proportionality considerations would therefore lead to women comprising between 20 to 50% of speakers. The Physiological Society currently requires at least 25% and sets a target of 33% female speakers. Perhaps The Society should lead the way by being even more ambitious than making the number of speakers proportional to the number of women. The fact that today only a minority of our most senior scientists are female reflects a number of influences during their careers including overt discrimination and problems of combining childcare with work, particularly when maternity leave was more restrictive than today. These senior women have also spent their careers in environments where harassment occurred at levels regarded as unacceptable today. Therefore, in order to provide role models to encourage younger women scientists, a more realistic 50% of speakers should be female.

The difficulty of this issue was first brought home to me in my role as Chair of the International Scientific Programme Committee for the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) meeting held in Birmingham in 2013. We decided that there needed to be appropriate female representation and agreed that this would be about 30%. A vocal minority objected to even this conservative figure on the grounds that fulfilling it would be positive discrimination and would risk diluting the quality of the science in the meeting. I still hear this argument today, phrased as, ‘in my field there just aren’t enough female leaders’. I would have more sympathy with it if I felt that people had considered all the people in the field. I have now been involved in organising enough symposia and meetings to realise that, when asked to suggest speakers, most of us (me included) think of people that we have heard speak recently. There is no surprise in this but it does result in ‘the same old people’ giving talks at most meetings. Not only does it discriminate against female speakers but also against the large number of male speakers who are not on the conference circuit. Paying more attention to how speakers are selected, trying to avoid people who spoke at the last year’s event, would therefore benefit men as well as women. The Society is dedicated to ensuring that its meetings encourage, support and provide opportunities for all researchers. In this context, the recent, successful Future Physiology meeting should be seen as providing opportunities for early career researchers.

So far, I have only discussed gender balance and paid no attention to other matters of diversity. What about ethnic diversity? Here it is much harder to obtain data to assess the issue as only 317 members of The Society have provided data on ethnic origins for the membership database. Of these, the largest group after White British/European is Asian British/European which makes up 10% of membership. Here again, there are differences with age: 20% of the under 40s but only 3% of the over 60s are Asian. Given these figures, it is hard to suggest what appropriate representation as speakers means but I am sure that this will be an important issue for the future.

The Society is committed to ensuring that all its processes are fair and transparent. Members are encouraged to provide suggestions on how to improve inclusivity. Please, also, make sure that you have included your diversity data on the membership database.