"One day last October, the current group of Knight Science Journalism Fellows called me into our sixth-floor conference room here at Building E19 and told me they wanted to share a concern. They were looking at our lineup of fall KSJ seminar speakers, and they were seeing a serious preponderance of men.
In a place like Boston/Cambridge, with its large community of women scientists and engineers, the Fellows politely asked, shouldn’t it be possible to recruit at least an equal number of male and female speakers?
At a university like MIT, where women made up 46 percent of the entering undergraduate class last year, what kind of message did it send, exactly, that only four of our 21 fall speakers, or 19 percent, were women?
When I realized what I’d done, I was mortified. Our twice-weekly seminars, which feature Boston-area scientists doing cutting-edge research as well as top practitioners from the worlds of journalism and publishing, are the most important part of the KSJ curriculum. Recruiting great seminar speakers is one of the main jobs of the Knight director, and it requires attention to a number of factors, including balance across scientific fields and, yes, across genders.
The truth was …
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