On "Manels", for my AMICOR girls

NIH Director Francis Collins Has a Plan to Help Eliminate "Manels"

BY ALICE PARK  

JUNE 24, 2019

If you want Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, to speak at your next event or conference, he has one important condition. Any panel in which he participates has to include a diverse range of speakers from different backgrounds and show a fair gender distribution. “If I don’t see that,” he says, “I will respectfully, or not so respectfully, decline. And not come.”

Collins laid out his requirements in an announcement, published on June 12, titled “Time to End the Manel Tradition.” It was the latest effort to address a glaring inequity in the scientific field: the tendency for speakers and panels to be composed entirely of men—“manels.”

While STEM efforts focus on ensuring girls and women receive equal consideration and opportunity to train and enter scientific fields, more established scientists and researchers, like Collins, are raising the alarm about male-dominated practices that need to be changed immediately./.../