Fig 1.
Overview of the main objectives and the study design applied for analyzing gender biases in the 1st Iberian Ecological Society (SIBECOL) meeting.
We used a multidimensional approach including conference registration data (representation), observations during the event (behavior), and post-conference survey (perception). Icon source: www.flaticon.com.
Fig 2.
Gender distribution of coauthors and conveners.
(A) Gender combination of researchers that signed as first and last coauthors in the contributions of the 1st SIBECOL Meeting (gender first author & gender last author; W = woman and M = man). We interpreted that the first author was the leader of the presented work, while the last author was the principal investigator of the research group or project. (B) Proportion of sessions whose conveners were mostly women (purple bar; > 60% of the conveners were women), equally distributed (grey bar; 40–60% of conveners were women), and mostly men (yellow bar; > 60% of conveners were men). The number of contributions (panel A) or sessions (panel B) falling within each category is shown in parenthesis.
Fig 3.
Proportion of questions asked by women plotted against the proportion of women attendees during the analyzed Q&A sessions.
The black line shows the theoretical proportional relationship between the two parameters. The yellow line shows the real proportional relationship based on a linear regression of the data (mean odds ratio: 0.7).
Fig 4.
Number of questions per talk raised by women (purple) and men (yellow) considering the gender of (A) the speaker and (B) the convener.
In all cases, the number of questions raised by each gender is standardized by the number of attendees of that gender (i.e., number of questions made by women / number of women in the audience). Asterisks indicate significant differences between the number of questions asked by women and men (t-test, p < 0.05).
Fig 5.
Proportion of participants that answered in the post-conference survey (A) “women asked less questions than men during oral communications” and (B) “I always asked questions when I wanted to”.
The proportion is shown for each gender separately (e.g., women that responded to a specific answer/total number of women that participated in the survey). Abbreviations: master students and predoctoral researchers (predoc), postdoctoral researchers (postdoc), senior researchers with non-permanent positions (senior non-perm), senior researchers with permanent positions (senior perm).
Table 1.
Summary of the responses to the five-point Likert scale questions included in the post-conference survey.