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Despite improved gender equality, women are still falling behind in certain fields. When it comes to presenting at academic or tech conferences, the panels are generally all males. With men promoting their field and studies, women could be discouraged to enter the field. Furthermore, the lack of female presenters could prevent them from being heard, reduce their chances of networking and lower their likelihood of moving up in their respective fields. In order to mend this gender inequality issue, researchers from Yale University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University stated that there must be at least one female organizer of the event.

"Put at least one woman on the team that organizes a scientific symposium, and that team will be much more likely to invite female speakers," said study co-author Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology and immunology at Yeshiva University, in a press release.

For this study, the researchers focused on 460 symposia that brought together 1,845 speakers. The symposia were a part of two meetings sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology, the General Meeting and the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

The researchers found that for symposia that were organized by an all male team, only a quarter of the speakers were females on average. When the organizing team had at least one woman, women made up around 43 percent of the speakers on average. The researchers calculated that one female organizer increased the proportion of females at these symposia by 72 percent.

The researchers reported, more specifically that two-men organizing teams convened 104 out of 216 sessions from 2011 to 2013. In these sessions, 22 to 27 percent of the speakers were women. In the rest of the sessions organized by a team made up of at least one woman, 39 to 46 percent of the speakers were females.

Despite this finding and the potential solution, researchers acknowledged that the gender inequalities are also caused by the fact that more men than women accept the invitations to speak.

"The most demanding phase of a career in biology, when it is important to communicate one's findings, and to build networks with other scientists, coincides with the age at which women's fertility starts to decline, meaning it is their last chance to have a family," said Julia Schroeder, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany reported by the Atlantic. "Stay-at-home-dads are rare, therefore, these women are less flexible about traveling for work, and may be more likely to decline invitations to speak."

According to LiveScience, in the United States, women earn around half of the science and engineering doctorate degrees. In certain fields, there are also more women attending graduate schools. However, women make up only around 21 percent of full-time professors.

The study was published in mBio.