The Impact of the Virtualization of Scholarly Conferences on the Gender Structure of Conference Contributors

TL;DR

This study examines how the shift to virtual and hybrid scholarly conferences during COVID-19 affected gender participation, revealing increased female involvement in virtual formats mainly due to decreased onsite participation.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on gender participation changes in conferences due to virtualization, using a large dataset and regression analysis.

Findings

Women participated more in virtual/hybrid conferences compared to onsite.

Decrease in women's onsite participation contributed to overall increased involvement.

Virtual/hybrid formats did not directly increase women's participation.

Abstract

This study investigates whether the virtualization of academic conferences in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the gender structure of conference participants. We explored this question utilizing authorship data from the Web of Science Conference Proceedings Citation Index for 180 conferences in 30 conference series held between 2017 and 2023. At least one edition of each analyzed conference series was launched in a virtual or hybrid form. This sample enables a comparison of differences in the gender participation of conference authors while controlling for heterogeneity among conference series. Using linear and logistic regression models, we identified a positive difference in women's involvement in virtual and hybrid conferences compared to onsite events. However, this effect was due less to the increased participation of women in virtual and hybrid conferences than to the decreased participation of women in the onsite editions of the analyzed conference series.