Who is attending IUSSI?
Biplabendu Das
14 July, 2022
Data: note from Ben Oldroyd (President, IUSSI 2014)
“For the Cairns meeting, everyone who submitted an abstract and paid the registration (or had it paid by IUSSI) was allowed to speak or give a poster as per their stated preference. Everyone who submitted a symposium proposal got to chair/organize that symposium (in one or two cases we asked proposers to team up).”
What is this document?
The goal was to explore the data for the past participants of the internation IUSSI conferences (2014 and 2018) to get a sense of the demography of the representatives. Note, this data is for the final list of participants that attended the conferences and not a comprehensive list of all applicants (see note from Ben Oldroyd). Please note, this is still a work in progress, and the document will change with time.
General Observations (data summary)
- In 2014, there were 576 participants from 39 countries, with a median of 5 participants/country.
- In 2018, there were 540 participants from 37 countries, with a median of 5 participants/country.
Participants from 5 countries (USA, Australia, Japan, Germany and UK) account for 60.76% of all participants in IUSSI 2014 and 52.59% in IUSSI 2018.
Participation by country
The following plot presents the percentage of IUSSI participants from different countries from the previous two IUSSIs (Aus_2014 = IUSSI 2014 in Australia, Bra_2018 = IUSSI 2018 in Brazil)
In case you like tables or absolute counts over proportions, here is a searchable table that provides the number of participants, per country, that attended the previous two IUSSIs.
Participation by Gender
Method:
I used genderizer.io for predicting gender from first names of the participants. The same tool is recommended by BiasWatchNeuro to estimate gender ratios in the absence of demographic data. The website for performing gender predictions can be found here.
The results from genderizer.io were filtered to keep only participant names with a count greater than 10 in the database, and with probability of gender assignment higher than 0.9
Post-filtering, a total of 461 (out of 576) participants in 2014 and 417 (out of 521) participants in 2018 remained.
Estimates
| gender | IUSSI_2014 | IUSSI_2018 |
|---|---|---|
| female | 166 | 160 |
| male | 295 | 257 |
The, estimated female:male ratio among selected participants at IUSSI 2014 was 0.56 and at IUSSI 2018 was 0.62.
Participation by Career-stage
The data doesn’t permit a comprehensive count of participants by their career stages since we have terms such as “Dr” that could indicate either a post-doc or a PI.
Additionally, the data for IUSSI 2014 has titles (“A/Prof”,“A/Professor”,“Ass/Prof”,“Associate Profes”,“Prof”,“Professor”) that have been clubbed together as “Prof.” and (Miss“,”Mr“,”Mrs“,”Ms“) that are represented as”Mr/Ms."
| degree | freq | percent |
|---|---|---|
| Prof. | 95 | 16.6 |
| Dr. | 256 | 44.6 |
| Mr/Ms. | 223 | 38.9 |
| degree | freq | percent |
|---|---|---|
| Prof. | 96 | 17.8 |
| Dr. | 132 | 24.4 |
| Post-Doc | 84 | 15.6 |
| Graduate | 194 | 35.9 |
| Undergraduate | 21 | 3.9 |
| Other | 13 | 2.4 |
The data does show a fairly good representation of graduate students at both IUSSIs.
However, in future, including the upcoming IUSSI 2022, it would be useful to come up with a standardized way to collect demography data during the registration process.
All code used for this document is available on my Github.