ABSTRACT
At a national conference of psychology a few years ago, a session starkly titled as “Gender Issues” was allotted a narrow space beneath a staircase, with half a dozen or so chairs thrown in for the audience, and no microphone and other paraphernalia generally accompanying presentations at academic conferences. The ostensible reason, after a protest at this unfairness was registered with the organisers, was that the other (fully equipped) lecture halls had been assigned to sessions that would draw larger audiences – the “high-status” sub-fields of Organisational Behaviour, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology – and that the Gender Issues session would elicit only a handful. As it turned out, with more and more people walking in and trying to squeeze themselves in into the below-the-staircase “hall”, and then overflowing into the corridors outside, the organisers had no other choice but to hastily scramble together a room large enough to accompany the billowing crowd.
