Charter for Gender Fairness at Conferences

Having noted that in physics, the visibility of women is lower than their activity rate in the community, the Société Française de Physique is at the origin of this parity charter, now adopted by several organizations such as the CNRS, the Société Française d’Optique, the Femmes & Sciences association, and taken into account by the European Physical Society.

Introduction

In Europe (EU-28), only 30% of the researchers in the government sector (all fields included) are women, and the proportion falls to 20% in the fields of Sciences and Technology (She Figures 2015). In all European countries, when the physicists’ figures are available, they are very similarii. In France, 21% of physicists are women (varying between 16% and 25% depending on the physics domain). The situation is not really better in the U.S. as the AIP reports that less than 23% of physics faculty members are women in the US (AIP statistics 2014).

Moreover discrimination takes place towards the few female physicists. As a matter of fact, the percentage of female invited speakers in conferences is even smaller, inducing more difficult employment and promotions for women. In all countries, the proportion of women is the smallest at the top of the academic hierarchy (for example only 10% of full professors are women in the US, from AIP). In France, whereas 25% of assistant professors in physics are women, there are only 16% of female full professors.

We believe that an important action is to promote fairness for women attending and presenting their scientific results at national and international conferences, following the IUPAP recommendation at the « Women in Physics » conference in Waterloo, Canada, 2014.

Preamble

The French Physical Society (SFP), the French Optical Society (SFO) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) are actively engaged in gender equality, which is today a significant international issue. They work to improve the place of women in physics research and to increase the visibility of women in Physics to attract more numerous young women in the Physics research. The Women in Physics Committee of SFP, supported by SFO and CNRS, proposes actions to actively promote fair recognition for women in scientific conferences. One of these actions is to ask the signature of the following charter to conference organizers applying for any help of SFP, SFO or CNRS (a label, a funding or a communication action).

Recommendations

  • Reach the percentage of women in the domain (when known – 20% otherwise) in the conference’s committees (scientific committee, program committee, international committee, publication committee, chairperson pool…).
  • Reach or exceed the percentage of women in the domain with a floor of 30% (when unknown, the floor applies) for women invited talks and women oral presentations.
  • Present these percentages and the women participants’ percentage at the closing session or at the general meeting if any during the conference.
  • Send to the ‘Women in Physics committee’ (mail to sfp-femmes@sfpnet.fr ) after the conference a final written report, including the percentages of women at all levels and describing the actions performed by the organizers to increase these percentages. Examples of such actions could include grants attributed for female PhD students or post-docs; access to childcare during the conference; organization of a “Gender Issues in Physics” session as a parallel session (see http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR16/Session/E14 ), or any other initiative to improve gender equality.

If you accept to follow these simple guidelines, it will convey a very positive image of your domain towards young scientists, and towards your sponsors and supervisors, in the frame of the equal opportunity policies of the institutes, the countries and Europe. This will have a beneficial impact in the development of your domain and will contribute to the success of your conference.