Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under-representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress 2011, where all abstract submissions were accepted for presentation. Women were under-represented among invited speakers at symposia (15% women) compared to all presenters (46%), regular oral presenters (41%) and plenary speakers (25%). At the ESEB congresses in 2001–2011, 9–23% of invited speakers were women. This under-representation of women is partly attributable to a larger proportion of women, than men, declining invitations: in 2011, 50% of women declined an invitation to speak compared to 26% of men. We expect invited speakers to be scientists from top ranked institutions or authors of recent papers in high-impact journals. Considering all invited speakers (including declined invitations), 23% were women. This was lower than the baseline sex ratios of early-mid career stage scientists, but was similar to senior scientists and authors that have published in high-impact journals. High-quality science by women therefore has low exposure at international meetings, which will constrain Evolutionary Biology from reaching its full potential. We wish to highlight the wider implications of turning down invitations to speak, and encourage conference organizers to implement steps to increase acceptance rates of invited talks.

6Territorial behaviour can only be adaptive if its costs are outweighed by its benefits. 7Territorial individuals incur costs by defending their territories against intruders. Usu-8 ally these intruders are assumed to be non-territorial floaters attempting to take over 9 the whole territory or neighbours trying to extend the borders of their own territory. 10We instead investigate how costs and benefits of territorial behaviour are affected by 11 neighbours which invade to steal resources on a territory. 12We show analytically that in the absence of defence intrusion into neighbouring 20Our results show that stealing of resources by neighbours can have a considerable effect on the evolutionary stability of territory defence and thus territoriality itself. A more mechanistic model of territorial behaviour is needed to incorporate these kinds of mechanisms into a general theory on the evolution of territoriality.

Theoretical research on evolutionary aspects of territoriality has a long history. Existing studies, however, differ widely in modelling approach and research question. A generalized view on the evolution of territoriality is accordingly still missing. In this review, we show that territorial conflicts can be classified into qualitatively distinct types according to what mode of access to a territory which competitor attempts to gain. We argue that many of the inconsistencies between existing studies can be traced back to the fact that, while using the same terminology, different instances of these types of conflicts have been investigated. We discuss the connections of each type of conflict to existing research within the wider area of animal conflicts. We conclude that a clear conceptual separation of different types of territorial conflicts is helpful but that a more general theory of territoriality has to account for interdependencies between them and that a more mechanistic approach to modelling territoriality is needed.