Amanda Sierra never intended to organize a weekend conference. “It is extremely disrespectful to start a conference over the weekend; it is almost insulting for the intrusion on family time and private life,” says the cell biologist at the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience in Leioa, Spain. At past conferences, Sierra would make a political statement of leaving early or asking organizers to change the date of her talk to avoid having to spend weekends away from her child.

Yet Sierra’s firm commitment to weekend family time was challenged when she began a role in event leadership. As a member of the local organizing committee for the 2023 International Brain Research Organization World Congress of Neuroscience held in Granada, Spain, in September, Sierra helped to plan a weekend programme for nearly 3,000 attendees, complete with a flamenco concert during the opening ceremony on Saturday. “I had no say on the dates,” says Sierra. “It was not possible to change things with so many people involved, so I did not even ask. I have organized other meetings during my career, and I usually try to have everyone home for the weekend.”

In response to studies that relate high rates of female attrition from biomedical research fields to the obligations of motherhood¹, researchers concerned about inclusivity are now debating the issue of weekend conference duties. Because published findings are often old news in the rapidly changing biomedical fields, in-person conferences offer a crucial opportunity for scientists to stay current on trends that shape projects and funding outcomes. Yet fields often expect rock-star-like travel schedules on an economy-class budget in addition to long, irregular weekday hours at the laboratory. This is why early-career scientists with children say that they must seek alternative childcare or risk being scooped or excluded from a collaboration simply because they missed a weekend conference.

Pressed for time

International meetings are often scheduled over weekends because that’s the only time venues have availability. Few cities have both suitable venues and enough hotel space to welcome 21,000 people from around the world, and even meetings for 3,000 researchers must be booked many years in advance. Because local businesses and regional associations tend to book venues during the working week, large meetings that span three to five days often need to start or end over a weekend. Women who continue to break the glass ceiling in biomedicine are now pitching this timing as an example of unnecessary conflict between work and family.

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“It is wonderful to see the younger faculty calling for change,” says Anne Sperling, a medical researcher at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville. “When I was a young investigator, everyone had the attitude that women should suck it up and work over the weekend without complaining.” Sperling stopped paying her membership fees and attending the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) conference because the meeting always coincided with Mother’s Day in the country. “My son also has a birthday around this same time, and I only returned to AAI when my boys were older and cared less about birthday parties and Mother’s Day celebrations,” says Sperling.

nd those calls are paying off. This year, the AAI offered free on-site childcare to the 3,500 attendees in Washington DC, attracting celebratory Tweets from attendees. And next year, the meeting will move to new dates, breaking a decade-long trend. On the AAI website, president Akiko Iwasaki confirmed that future conferences will be held on non-holiday weekends to help parents to attend. “Women have been asking for these changes for years,” says Sperling, who adds that many fathers also spoke out against travel over Mother’s Day.

Fresh opportunities

Thanks to the free childcare, Jessica Osterhout, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City attended this year’s conference with her infant. She strapped her daughter into a front baby carrier to attend sessions while her husband cared for their three-year-old son at home. “Travel is difficult because I am still breastfeeding my second child, and most conferences do not even offer childcare or lactation rooms,” says Osterhout. As a new faculty member who launched her first lab just one year ago, Osterhout echoes Sierra’s disdain for weekend conferences. “I do not want to put too much on my husband by expecting him to parent alone over the weekend without childcare.”

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Many of the preschool, nursery and nanny services that parents rely on for childcare are closed over weekends, and this leaves little support for the parent who stays home with young children. For this reason, Silvia Pittolo, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, had to cancel much of her conference schedule after she gave birth to her son. Even crucial networking opportunities, such as the August 2023 Gordon Research Conference in Barcelona, Spain, proved impossible owing to childcare demands. But doing so has had its costs. Pittolo won a Ramón y Cajal Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, which would allow her to use her salary and research funds at any institution to support independent research. To keep the award, however, Pittolo must find a collaborating host lab that can receive the funds and sponsor her research. When her husband accepted a position in Barcelona, Pittolo began looking for a partnering lab located in commuting distance. However, she is still looking months later, and attributes her struggles in part to her inability to attend conferences. “Without opportunities to network at conferences over the last year, it has been difficult to make connections with researchers in Barcelona,” she says.

The biomedical research community, for example, found the move to hybrid conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic very difficult. Many researchers meet hiring principal investigators at conferences, and although hybrid meetings are less expensive to attend, networking for potential jobs doesn’t always translate well to Zoom. Furthermore, researchers are more likely to cite work if they have seen it presented at a conference². “We learnt during the pandemic that we need to meet for drinks, talk about the kids, and get to know people in person to meet new collaborators,” says Sierra. Osterhout agrees, adding that “scientists are a bit timid socially, and you cannot just go into a Zoom room and make a life-long friend. Zoom is much more artificial as only one person speaks at a time.”

Regulatory constraints

Conference organizers say that they want to develop meeting schedules that work for everyone, but warn that change will be slow owing to regulatory and financial hurdles. In Europe and the United Kingdom, for instance, children are not allowed to enter the main exhibition areas at most conferences backed by pharmaceutical companies because advertising regulations that restrict the public promotion of prescription-only medications require all attendees to hold a vetted professional status. US conferences are more flexible, although children are sometimes prohibited when talks include proprietary findings that involve human participants. “Babes in arms might be allowed in the plenary auditorium even if the main meetings are closed, but this is at the discretion of the conference planners,” says Kate Sargent, deputy managing director at Bioscientifica in Bristol, UK, which provides publishing and events services to the bioscience and pharmaceutical industries.

Although many biomedical research conferences function independently of major pharmaceutical firms, they also have dwindling resources for childcare services. “In the good old days before COVID closures, people would extend conference stays for family tourism,” says Sargent. But Sargent says that attendance at some conferences has dropped by 50–60% compared with before the pandemic, so many associations are questioning whether they can afford to prioritize funds and staff time to continue family programmes or secure licences for childcare. They often need to fund legacy programmes such as sustainability, community volunteer days and research scholarships before sponsoring new family services.

The right mix: making a hybrid conference work for all

Not all researchers prefer weekday conferences, and it could be that conversations about inclusion need to consider a range of schedules to support parents in choosing which conferences to attend. Tejaswini Reddy is completing an MD–PhD at the Texas A&M University School of Medicine in Bryan and fell behind after attending this year’s American Association for Cancer Research meeting in April in Orlando, Florida, where she received the Women in Cancer Research Scholar Award. The award acknowledged Reddy’s dissertation research on metaplastic breast cancer therapy, which went from bench to bedside last January as part of an early-stage clinical trial backed by pharmaceutical giant Novartis and the US National Cancer Institute, but receiving it in person meant she had to miss parts of her clinical rotations. “At this point in my career, I strongly prefer weekend conferences because I train with staff physicians and patients during standard weekday hours as part of my rotation,” says Reddy.

Clinicians of every profession resoundingly gravitate towards Saturday and Sunday conferences because they otherwise have to close care services that run during the working week. Educators, historians and journalists who attend biomedical conferences might also prefer weekend conferences because they otherwise have to find colleagues to cover their work while they are away. Academic research scientists have more flexibility with weekday travel because their contracts tend to require less classroom teaching.

For parents who cannot travel to conferences owing to childcare or weekend conflicts, Sperling recommends giving invited talks as part of a campus speaker series. Invited talks often require only one or two days of travel and can be scheduled with more flexibility. “There is no easy solution, but the good news is that people are starting to listen,” says Sperling. “There is more of an effort to work with early-stage investigators and new faculty so that men and women can spend the weekend with their families.”