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Researchers Revolt Against Weekend Conferences (nature.com) 214

In response to studies that relate high rates of female attrition from biomedical research fields to the obligations of motherhood, researchers concerned about inclusivity are now debating the issue of weekend conference duties. Nature: Because published findings are often old news in the rapidly changing biomedical fields, in-person conferences offer a crucial opportunity for scientists to stay current on trends that shape projects and funding outcomes. Yet fields often expect rock-star-like travel schedules on an economy-class budget in addition to long, irregular weekday hours at the laboratory. This is why early-career scientists with children say that they must seek alternative childcare or risk being scooped or excluded from a collaboration simply because they missed a weekend conference.

International meetings are often scheduled over weekends because that's the only time venues have availability. Few cities have both suitable venues and enough hotel space to welcome 21,000 people from around the world, and even meetings for 3,000 researchers must be booked many years in advance. Because local businesses and regional associations tend to book venues during the working week, large meetings that span three to five days often need to start or end over a weekend. Women who continue to break the glass ceiling in biomedicine are now pitching this timing as an example of unnecessary conflict between work and family.

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Researchers Revolt Against Weekend Conferences

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  • Online conferences (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @01:06AM (#63976050)
    Wasn't it just a couple of years ago that everyone was saying that conferences should be online & were espousing their virtues & convenience?
    • Not really, no.
      • OK then, maybe not EVERYONE.
        • Like, no, really no.

          Some people were, but frankly online conferences sucked compared to in person ones.

          The value of conferences was maybe 20% talks, 80% interactions with other people. This is where you chat at a poster session or discuss the last talk with friends/colleagues/your seat neighbor/the speaker. All of that important stuff was completely 100% missing at online conferences.

          And even for talks you had garbage video links with no speaker feedback. As an experienced conference speaker, you can see th

    • Don't think so... people were forced to do online conferences during the pandemic but nobody really liked it.

      I've attended a pretty good number of conferences, and to be honest, the formal presentations just provide a framework for the conference and are really the least important part of the gathering. From my experience, the most productive part of the conference is the informal discussions with other attendees during coffee breaks, over drinks/dinner, and during chance encounters. Those are where actual

  • by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @01:28AM (#63976070)

    Stop trying, set your priorities, and accept that something has to lose out.
    Men accepted that millennia ago... it's why "behind every successful man stands a woman" exists.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Why not, "Behind every successful woman stands a man?" BTW, arguing that something's right because it's the status quo isn't much of an argument. Nietzsche would tell you that such an attitude would doom you to decadence... but yeah, he could be pretty melodramatic.
      • by MysteriousPreacher ( 702266 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @02:23AM (#63976130) Journal

        Because there's no reason beyond ideology to believe social construction is why males and females are on aggregate very different in terms of what drives them. That's pretty clearly evidenced cross cultures and cross domains.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          Ok. That explains why for instance being Jewish is inherited via the female line.

          In every society, you could see how after large conflicts with many men left on the battle field, women successfully grew into hitherto male roles. It's not the roles and not the women who don't fit together, it's the men pushing women out of roles of prestige and power.

          In Computer Science, it was women who did most of the coding in the 1950ies and 1960ies. Only with the beginning prestige of the field in society, men becam

          • by serafean ( 4896143 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @04:34AM (#63976224)

            kidnapping from conquered territories is a thing too... Lets call that forced exploration.

          • by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @05:16AM (#63976258)

            In Computer Science, it was women who did most of the coding in the 1950ies and 1960ies.

            Women did data entry (keypunch operators). It was mostly men who wrote the software. To see the true figures you need to break it down by job roles, not just "how many women filed into the computer centre each morning".

            • Women did data entry (keypunch operators).

              Which is what "coding" meant back then. The mostly men who wrote the software were programming. I assume that the recent preference for "coding" to describe the activity of programming is because three-syllable words are considered too elitist or some such nonsense.

              • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
                I've always wondered why the word "programming" got lost in favor of into "coding" some time in the 1980s.
                • by skam240 ( 789197 )

                  If what you say is true some one should tell reality the word programming is "lost" because that is not at all an odd word for me to hear.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              That simply isn't true. A lot of early software development was done by women, with a lot of very important foundational principles being discovered or formalized by them. Here are some examples.

              Grace Hopper - The first compiler/linker, FLOW-MATIC language (became COBOL)
              Jean E. Sammet - COBOL
              Kathleen Booth - assembly language, built multiple early computers (with Xenia Sweeting)
              Audrey Bates - earliest program for lambda calculus calculations
              Mary Kenneth Keller - first American to get a PhD in Computer Scien

              • by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @09:05AM (#63976692)
                The number of people working in IT in 1970, the first time this category was included in the US census, was a bit under half a million [census.gov]. You've identified ten, and they were so rare that they typically got dedicated writeups and news coverage, which just emphasises how unbalanced the field was.
                • Agreed. Without taking anything away from those achievements, it's silly to create this arbitrary category in order to argue members of it were particularly notable by virtue of being in that category.

                  It reminds me of Project Steve, created as a counter to the creationist tendency to compile long lists of supposed scientists who dissent from evolution as a theory to explain the diversity of species. Let's do Project John:

                  John Vincent Atanasoff - inventor of the first electronic digital computer.
                  John Cocke -

          • In Computer Science, it was women who did most of the coding in the 1950ies and 1960ies. Only with the beginning prestige of the field in society, men became interested in coding

            That's a nice example of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Once the clerical components of programming were relegated to software (assemblers, compilers, etc.), you basically got a very different job afterwards. Comparing the workforces of what are essentially two different jobs is dodgy at best, if not outright disingenuous.

          • Ok. That explains why for instance being Jewish is inherited via the female line.

            That's only for Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic and Oriental trace it through the father.
            And it's only been that way since CE 1750. Prior to that, Ashkenazi rabbim *also* traced parentage
            through the father.

          • women were pushed out of the field. saw the same happen in the 1990ies again in East Germany, when suddenly, only men started classes in Computer Science

            Unless the women were somehow prevented from taking computer science classes, then the women were not pushed out of the field.

      • by Nutria ( 679911 )

        Why not? Because there's only 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week.

        It's the same reason that calls for making this and and be mandatory in school is impossible: there are only so many instruction hours in the school day.

      • at a time when women were considered almost less than human and their abilities were completely dismissed. It was a way to emphasize their abilities and contributions and do so in a way men at the time would be willing to accept.

        Fun fact, but ancient cultures in the west thought of women not as another sex, but as men who hadn't fully developed. e.g. their muscles didn't grow right and their penises didn't pop out. It was literally a birth defect to them. That mistaken and foolish idea persisted in vari
    • > something has to lose out.

      The loser will be all of us. If women have to choose between motherhood and being a scientist, many will choose motherhood and the world will have fewer scientists and more women peddling MLM schemes on Youtube because being an "influencer" is one of those jobs where you can set your own schedule and work around the baby.

      • by Nutria ( 679911 )

        There's only 24 hours in a day. It's impossible for anyone to have it all, not just women.

        Men can go to weekend conferences, work 80 hours/week, go on military deployment for months, etc when they sacrifice being home with their families.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Freedom Bug ( 86180 )

          What a defeatist attitude. Of course you can't have it all, but it's obviously possible to have a career and be a mother simultaneously, a majority of mothers do so successfully. There are some careers that are fairly incompatible with being a parent; serving on a submarine for example. But being a scientist can and should be a predictable 40 hour job completely compatible with parenthood.

    • Stop trying, set your priorities, and accept that something has to lose out.
      Men accepted that millennia ago... it's why "behind every successful man stands a woman" exists.

      If that were true about men you wouldnt see data like this https://www.pewresearch.org/sh... [pewresearch.org] . The only way you'd have a point is if women and men did an equal amount of child rearing and that is definitely not the case in most families.

    • Stop trying, set your priorities, and accept that something has to lose out.
      Men accepted that millennia ago... it's why "behind every successful man stands a woman" exists.

      In other words, women need to stay in the back?

      Besides, this isn't about prioritizing, it's about making accommodations.

      Why do conferences typically have food included? Because men realized they have to eat, so that's added to the budget no problem.

      Why do they involve so much expensive travel to begin with? Because the men doing it liked to travel.

      Why do the PhDs and Postdocs extend into the early thirties? Because that's when men are ready to settle down.

      Of course, that timeline turns out to be a disaster

      • by Nutria ( 679911 )

        In other words, women need to stay in the back?

        Where in the heck did you get that from my comment?

        Sure, there were/are social expectations, and many women wanted to marry successful (or prospectively successful) men, but few (especially middle- and upper-class) Western women have been in arranged marriages in quite a few centuries.

        • In other words, women need to stay in the back?

          Where in the heck did you get that from my comment?

          It was a bit pithy, but to be fair, that's exactly what that quote actually means.

          The man gets all the attention and glory, but his success is only possible due to the woman who is assisting him in relative anonymity, and she's usually relegated to domestic chores.

          I don't think that's a particularly fair setup.

  • empty office blocks (Score:4, Interesting)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @02:02AM (#63976112)

    Isn't there lots of empty office space? I'm sure deals on renting whole floors per week can be worked out.

    • by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      Conferences are usually held in hotels because most of the attendees are travelling (the Latin root literally means "bring together") so they need to stay in a hotel anyway. Unless the office space is adapted into hotel space, it's not solving the problem.

      • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

        Conferences are usually held in hotels

        Small conferences are. Big ones are held in conference centers (or "convention centers").

        But the practical difficulties of finding empty floors of large office buildings and setting them up for a large conference is probably prohibitive. And the owners would want the stipulation "we can cancel this contract at any time if we find a tenant", which would kill the deal. (Not to mention that you'd probably have to find a new space every year, since vacancies come and go.)

        • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          I'd agree there's a lot of trouble for a one-time event and it's unlikely to happen. Thus it's highly unlikely this is going to get settled from the demand side. But that doesn't preclude the idea of permanently converting some office space into places to hold public meetings, space that is zoned Commercial and therefore can't just be converted into housing.

      • by dfm3 ( 830843 )
        There's also transportation and other logistics to figure out. We are currently in the early planning stages for a conference next year that will bring people from three different countries, and we want to hold it in the southeastern US, but an almost complete lack of non-driving transportation infrastructure in our cities means that we need to pick a location that is close to an airport - this means that, for example, Houston is out because it's a 45 minute Uber ride from the airport to downtown in best co
        • My industry uses San Antonio instead of Houston. The conference center and satellite hotels are a 15 minute shuttle ride from the airport and walking distance to each other. Plenty of restaurants along the River Walk, also in walking distance. From what people told me travel from Japan royally sucked though.
  • Trade offs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MysteriousPreacher ( 702266 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @02:37AM (#63976142) Journal

    It's difficult juggling being a mother with having a career that involves travel? No shit. It's also difficult having a high paying career in IT while also trying to be a professional footballer.

    Life is about tradeoffs. Either accept raising your children well requires sacrifices on your part, or marry a man who can fill your role while you're away. Women in particular have been fed a narrative of being able to do anything, akin to imagining one could simultaneously be a heavy weight lifter and a gymnast. Attempting thus invariably ends in disappointment, then resentment when reality doesn't accord with what they've been told to expect.

    • Women in particular have been fed a narrative of being able to do anything

      You can do anything, but not everything.

    • by flink ( 18449 )

      Why do you object to making it easier to do both tho? Pushing back on established work norms to make them more humane and require us to sacrifice less of our limited leisure time to travel helps everyone, not just working women. It's not a zero sum game.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If only it was as simply as selecting a suitable husband, like choosing a new car with adequate cargo space.

      The reality is that most people want kids, and there is a biological clock ticking on their ability to have them. Which means they need to start in the earlier stages of their careers, when they typically earn less and need to do more hours and travel.

      Even if the husband is willing, there is still a bias that expects them not to do too much childcare. In many jurisdictions they get less paid time off

  • "Honey, it looks like I have a conference I have to attend in June and it's on a weekend inon Boston. I don't want to leave you taking care of the kids for one weekend in June, but I have to, because it's my job." said no woman ever. Well, maybe 2 or 3. Sounds like some loudmouths with megaphones have the platform again.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My wife often has to travel for work. I look after our kids for a couple days. It's not hard.
      How soft are you if you can't even manage to look after your own kids for a little while? Man up a little, don't be such a baby.
  • It's a mess for work life balance, but how do you expect it to change exactly? Unless you get a time machine and gender transforming raygun, this isn't going to change for decades. So much inertia built into the system. You could say you're getting it moving for next generations, but I doubt the future will be similar enough to the past for it to matter. Between demographic change and AI, the future will be a strange place.

    • It's a mess for work life balance, but how do you expect it to change exactly?

      I dunno by people complaining about it and organizers stopping organizing weekend conferences.

      Weekend conferences are complete bullshit. They are not common in the UK (at least not in my or my SO's area), and are generally regarded as a shitty thing done by people who are inveterate workaholics who don't give a shit about anyone's work life balance.

      I'm a man without kids and they are still awful, because I don't want to dedicate m

  • Mixing issues... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @06:27AM (#63976360) Homepage

    There are two issues here, and they need to be looked at separately.

    The first issue is scheduling conferences on weekends. Is that a good thing, because the conferences have less impact on your work? Or is it a bad thing, because the conferences take away from your personal time? This issue applies to anyone, not just to women. Personal opinion: weekend conferences should not exist, precisely because they force people to sacrifice their personal lives.

    The second issue is the question of disparate impact on women. This is not relevant. Parents are responsible for organizing childcare, not conference organizers. My wife attended a couple of conferences when we had a baby at home. Guess what, wow, I took care of the baby. That's what parents do.

    • There are two issues here, and they need to be looked at separately.

      The first issue is scheduling conferences on weekends. Is that a good thing, because the conferences have less impact on your work? Or is it a bad thing, because the conferences take away from your personal time? This issue applies to anyone, not just to women. Personal opinion: weekend conferences should not exist, precisely because they force people to sacrifice their personal lives.

      If a person demand that their workweek ends on Friday at 5:00 PM exactly, and have no interactions with work until 8:00 AM Monday morning, with exactly 1 hour off from 12 to 1 PM and a 15 minute break at 10 AM and 3 PM, there are many options for them to never have work interfere with their requirements.

      I've always done what I need to do, when I need to do it. Sometimes that means getting up to go to work early, and staying late, and sometimes it involves weekend work. Sometimes on travel, I work weekend

    • That's what parents do.

      Well, no, it isn't and that's the point. You do (good for you!) but are you really not aware that you are in a minority?

      https://www.pewresearch.org/sh... [pewresearch.org]

      The second issue is the question of disparate impact on women. This is not relevant.

      It is. It's a shitty choice that has a disparate effect on one group because of other shitty choices other people make. That's another way in which weekend conferences suck.

  • If conferences have to book 3 years out then demand outstrips supply and profit is being left on the table by people who would otherwise build more conference centers.

    When the market seems to shun profit it's a guarantee that there's government interference somewhere.

    These are usually Zoning/Planning boards denying building permits.

    So now we know they have a disparate deleterious effect on women.

    This is illegal and unconstitutional.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      If conferences have to book 3 years out then demand outstrips supply and profit is being left on the table by people who would otherwise build more conference centers.

      No, profit is not being "left on the table".

      Building more conference centers would mean that more of the time the space is being unused, and there would be less profit, not more.

      If you're willing to take whatever week the facility happens to be unutilized, you can plan a conference with less than three years. If you want to be able to pick your date in advance, though, you want to schedule well in advance, so you get the week you want and don't discover the Moose convention has booked the space you want o

  • A day of rest? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @08:02AM (#63976516)

    I'm an atheist and don't have a lot of patience for organized religion. That said, I think our society was the better for having Sunday as a 'day of rest', and I think we should bring it back. I get that there will always be necessary exceptions, and that there will be some people working every day of the week.

    But really, do we need the expectation of most of us being available for work every single day? Wouldn't it be better for there to be a general expectation that there's one day of the week that we can mostly share, as a society, as a day away from work? Won't business and research still get done if most people have a common day off?

    I remember a time when most stores and businesses were closed on Sundays. It was sometimes inconvenient, but mostly it was restful; and given that both my parents worked in retail, I now see those days as a blessing. Maybe we could bring that back? Maybe the perceived loss of 'productivity' would be made up for and them some by having a regular day on which earning a living was mostly put aside in favour of being with family and friends, and in favour of taking a fucking break?

    Surely one day per week of "humans being" instead of "humans doing" would benefit us all, including the researchers in TFS.

  • My mother is a physicist, specializing in magnetic phenomena in amorphous and nanocrystalline alloys. When I was a child (so, back in the USSR), she often took me to various conferences. The organizers knew that people would come with children and organized various child-friendly activities such as a ping-pong tournament, various outdoor games, lectures on the history of physics and astronomy, a competition to find particular stars in the night sky, and so on. I enjoyed these.

  • Time to start paying more OT and drop 996 work!

  • phd students need an union!

  • um, not really (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pz ( 113803 ) on Friday November 03, 2023 @08:55AM (#63976660) Journal

    My credentials for the following opinion are that I have attended international scientific conferences for about 4 decades now, and have run my own international conference for 2 decades.

    Conferences are typically scheduled so that the travel can span a Saturday night and therefore take advantage of lower airfares. That is the long and short of it. There are conferences that are scheduled in the middle of the week, and, usually, travel to them is much more expensive. I just attended one in Germany that was like that: Monday and Tuesday, and the tickets were, literally $1000 less for me if I arrived on Saturday rather than Sunday. So, mindful of my research dollars, I arrived Saturday and paid for an extra day in my hotel, saving most of a kilobuck. That recent example is typical for mid-week conferences, which I personally dislike.

    The summary's assertion that weekends are the only times these venues are free does not jibe with my experience scheduling conferences in the least.

    Furthermore, there's no one preventing conference attendees from not taking "rock star" flights, but arriving early like I just did in Germany. For my meetings, I actively encourage people to arrive a day early, because they usually come from all across the globe. When I go to a meeting, I *never* arrive the day it starts -- what happens if your flight is delayed or cancelled, as happens with non-trivial frequency?

    As far as day care, my employer provides financial resources for extra expenses when attending conferences. Many meetings offer day care for a very reasonable rate as well. If you take NIH money to run your conference, you're required to provide day care options.

    So, this posting sounds very much like a hit piece from someone with an axe to grind.

    • by pz ( 113803 )

      Following-up on that idea, I also dislike mid-week conferences because it means a much higher burden for my spouse, as they must now take the kids to and from school, lessons, afterschool sports, appointments, help with homework, etc, a responsibility that we normally share. Weekend conferences are much less of a family burden because there are fewer family responsibilities during the weekend. Furthermore, it is usually far easier to get help from family or friends on the weekends than during the week. S

  • I can not parse from the incoherent summary if women are PRO weekend meetings or AGAINST weekend meetings - but I would certainly be against. Speaking as someone in the private sector you would not catch me dead at a conference on a weekend. It is bad enough when they start them on a Monday and expect people to travel on a weekend. People have personal lives. I let my workday intrude on my weekend as little as possible, I certainly won't make an effort to do it.

    • Indeed it seems like the summary has a complaint about something but cannot put it into words. As for the article, I do not understand some of the points:

      International meetings are often scheduled over weekends because that’s the only time venues have availability. Few cities have both suitable venues and enough hotel space to welcome 21,000 people from around the world, and even meetings for 3,000 researchers must be booked many years in advance.

      I have been to many weekday conferences with over 21,000 people so the weekend is not the only time venues are available. By "few" I suppose they mean large cities as opposed to tiny towns because any major city should be able to hold 21,000 people during the week. Heck Las Vegas seems to only exist for gambling and hosting conferences. It is challenging l

  • Immediate reaction: "Aww, is being a scientist hard?" But then...society benefits the more people are able to be productive in science, and the more interwoven it can be with ordinary human life.

    Professional science shouldn't be an unapproachable citadel where only shaolin kung-fu monks can handle it. It should be your neighbor, someone on your basketball team, a girlfriend you can see more than once a month, a wife your children know as someone more important than the payroll administrator for their n
  • Not every culture celebrates the sabbath on the same day of the week ?
  • And do any of the folks attending these weekend conferences get vacation time for attending? Or do they get paid in some manner for attending ABOVE being "salaried"?

    Of course not. Their employers want them to attend, and therefore work, for free.

  • Conferences are always a better way to find out about research -- the authors are more likely to actually explain what they found, rather than produce an opaque vomit of words in some paper. ...In any field.

Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about. -- Philippe Schnoebelen

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