How can I help?

  • Spread the word: As most bias is unconscious and unintended, we hope that bringing to awareness the issue of skewed speaker panels in conferences will go a long way to solving the problem, because conference organizers will notice if their meeting roster is not representative of their field.
  • Send us information: Knowledge is power, and we’d like BWN to be as complete a resource as possible. Send information about conferences in your field by filling out this form. Estimate base rates in your subfield and report these (together with reproducible methods of estimation) to our growing database of base rates. We are all busy researchers, so if many people contribute a small amount each, we will amass useful data on our field.
  • Choose your (and your students’) conferences wisely: There are so many conferences to go to. Consult biaswatchneuro.com when deciding what conferences to attend or to recommend to your trainees, and keep in mind that conferences are not only a vessel for scientific discourse, but also an educational tool. By sending trainees to conferences with more diverse programs, you will help to ensure their exposure to the full set of findings in the field, regardless of the gender or race of the scientists who discovered them.  This will help eliminate biases in the next generation, and your field will retain more promising female and minority researchers as they ascend the notorious “leaky pipeline” of academic rank.
  • Support BWN: