As an established international conference, NELS aims to attract and present the highest quality contemporary linguistic research of theoretical interest. As such, we are interested in the diversity of submissions and accepted presentations. Here we present statistics on this year’s submissions. We hope that this presentation sheds some light into the submission and selection process, and that the data contributes to a broader conversation on diversity and representation in our field. We encourage other large conferences to also share such statistics.
All data was collected manually after all acceptance decisions were finalized. Information regarding authors’ gender was not requested at the time of the submission. Neither this information nor information about the authors’ affiliation informed acceptance decisions. Gender is presented using a ‘male’/’female’ binary. We know that this is imperfect but believe that this information is still valuable.
There were 417 submitted abstracts, of which 50 were accepted as talks and 50 were accepted as posters. The overall acceptance rate was 24%, while the acceptance rate for talks was 12%.
Gender distribution
Out of the total number of submissions, 44% of the authors are female and 55% are male. Out of the accepted abstracts, 43% of the authors are female and 57% are male. There are 23 talks that list a female author first and 27 talks that list a male author first. There are 26 posters with a female author first and 24 posters with a male author first.
| Number of abstracts | Female authors | Male authors | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstracts submitted for review | 417 | 270 (44%) | 338 (55%) |
| Abstracts accepted as a paper | 50 | 31 (38%) | 49 (61%) |
| Abstracts accepted as a poster | 50 | 35 (48%) | 38 (52%) |
| Abstracts accepted | 100 | 66 (43%) | 87 (57%) |
Session chairs recorded the gender distribution in the question periods. The results are recorded in this spreadsheet. Chairs were also asked to call on female audience members first whenever possible.