Gender Diversity in iGEM

iGEM is committed to being fully inclusive to all members of its community. Over the last several years, iGEM has recommended that teams should be gender-balanced, having approximately as many women as men on a team. As the picture of 2016 Stanford-Brown Team shows on the right, many teams have taken this recommendation seriously and have helped to increase our gender diversity throughout the competition.

While this was a great step forward, we at iGEM HQ realized that promoting gender-balanced teams was only one step towards gender diversity and inclusion in iGEM. With the help of our community, we formed the Diversity Committee to help inform and advise us on ways we could improve diversity in our community.

The iGEM Diversity Committee would love for iGEM to be a place where people of all genders are equally represented. The Paris Bettencourt iGEM team of 2013 performed an extensive study of gender diversity within the iGEM competition. This study found that women were under-represented at all levels of iGEM, with lower levels of representation for more senior categories of participants.

Figure 1: Paris-Bettencourt 2013, provided by Aude Bernheim.

In 2017, gender data was collected from new iGEM participants. We are really pleased to see that gender balance has improved!


iGEM students have really increased their gender diversity, and now nearly 50% of iGEM students are female or non-binary. Well done! Students, we will need your help to continue to improve gender diversity among iGEM PIs, instructors, and advisors as you advance in your careers.


Improving gender diversity among iGEM judges has been a major focus over the past few years, and we are approaching 50% female/non-binary judges despite the gender imbalance among PIs, instructors, and advisors. We will continue to work to improve the gender balance in judging in future years.


We encourage the iGEM community to continue to work for increased gender diversity within iGEM, and we will report back on the progress again next year!

Figure 2: The “male” and “female” groups include both cisgender and transgender individuals. In 2017, individuals were only able to select one response; we’ve since realized that this was a flaw in our survey. In the future, we will allow respondents to select multiple responses for increased accuracy.