Conference Invitees

Motivation and Takeaways

Invited speakers at conferences tend to be those who have received the most recognition for their work in their subfield. By collecting data on the representation of women across invited talks, we can ask whether it seems that women faculty members are being recognized at the same rate as men. Considering the field as a whole, there does not seem to be a discrepancy between the gender proportions of faculty and invited speakers, according to this dataset. However, contrary to anecdotal evidence, in this dataset women invited speakers are under-represented in Phonology/Phonetics and Sociolinguistics conferences. Furthermore, women conference invitees in Experimental fields are over-represented compared to the actual proportion of women faculty members in those fields.

Data

Methodology

LingAlert was used to make a list of recent conferences and their invited speakers. Specific details about the conferences were manually collected from each conference website. For each conference, the following was recorded: year of the conference, region, main topic, theoretical bias, and language bias. Each invited speaker’s CV or website was used to determine their graduating university, current affiliation, perceived gender, and year of graduation. The subfields represented in this data are the same as in our Career Stages data.

• Number of Conferences: World = 48; North America = 22
• 87% of the conference invitee data is after 2003.

The data above was updated in November 2016. More recently collected data will be added in the coming months.

Data Download

You can download the data using the “Raw Data” tab in the display above.