Making gender equality more than theoretical

Three years ago, the French Network for Theoretical Chemistry (RFCT) started looking at the gender balance of invited speakers to meetings that were applying for funding from us. We were not happy with what we found.

Of the 20 proposals we received, the percentage of women invited to speak ranged from 0% to 50% (in only two cases). Overall, of the 280 invited speakers only 24% were women. In contrast, women represent around 35% of the computational and theoretical chemistry community.¹

To address the problem, on 20 April we announced that we will no longer fund conferences where all the invited speakers are men.