The impact of the virtualization of scholarly conferences on the gender structure of conference contributors

The underrepresentation of women in academic conferences is an underexplored aspect of gender disparity in science. This study aims to expand knowledge on this issue by investigating 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, with a total number of 88,384 papers and 404,295 authors. 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.