On my old experiment at Fermilab, the 660+ collaborators cannot give a presentation at a professional physics conference unless they are specifically allowed to do so by a small committee called the "Speakers' Bureau". How people get appointed to the Speakers' Bureau is a very mysterious and secretive process; the members have no apparent fixed term, and are appointed (and de-appointed) at the whim of the heads of the experiment. The membership of 8 person bureau is exclusively white, and very male; out of the last 6 years there have been 15 different appointees to the bureau, and all were white males except for one lone (white) female. Some of the members of the bureau have served on it for longer than 6 years. For comparison, the experiment is only around 70% white male. The probability that 14 out of the last 15 appointees to the SB happened to be white male by random chance in the absence of gender bias is less than 1%.
It should be noted that I don't think my experiment is particularly unique in the format or demographics of its Speakers' Bureau. Most particle physics experiments have Speakers' Bureau appointment rules that are quite similar to this. But I don't know if other experiments have SB's that have racial and gender demographics so different than that of the collaboration.
The members of the Speakers' Bureau have the autocratic power to confer or deny to junior physicists the all-important career-advancement perk that is a conference presentation. This is true at pretty much all particle physics experiments. Why are conference presentations so important to junior physicists? Because there are over 600 people on these large experiments, and the only real way the outside world has of determining who did what work is via the conference presentation (because each publication the experiment produces has all 600+ names on the author list listed in alphabetical order only). Being allotted a conference presentation says to the outside world that the presentor not only had a lot to do with the analysis being presented, but that their experiment thought enough of them as a physicist to allott them the presentation.
At least that is the idea. In practice, my statistical studies show that gender plays a more important role in how the presentations are allotted than actual work on the analysis; my studies show that female postdoctoral researchers on my old experiment have to produce three times more analysis papers than their male peers in order to be allocated a conference presentation.
I should mention here that almost none of the current and past members of the Speakers' Bureau are actually employed by the lab. As well, the people on that board do not employ the people to whom they allott conference presentations. Yet the number of conference presentations a junior physicist is allotted can make or break his or her career.
The lab has an obligation to comply with the federal law Title IX which prohibts discrimination in any federally funded education or research activities. The lab is a research institute that receives federal funds, and it is the lab's responsibility to ensure that the research activities at the lab do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, parental status, etc. Under federal regulations, Fermilab is in fact supposed to have a Title IX coordinator who is supposed to ensure compliance with Title IX. Not only does Fermilab not have a Title IX coordinator, they don't even mention Title IX anywhere on the Fermilab web sites. Go ahead, look if you don't believe me. Fermilab is run by the Department of Energy, and it should be noted that the DoE has been so negligent in its compliance with Title IX regulations that it has been put on the worst-of-the-worst-list-of-federal-agencies by the federal government. The US government can't even get a federal agency to comply with federal laws.
