The issue of gender diversity in the workplace is an important one, and raises questions about the differences between men and women. This conference takes stock of what science knows about the psychological differences between men and women. Differences in personality, preferences and cognitive characteristics are reviewed.

Even if it doesn't explain all the differences between men and women, discrimination is very much present, and largely unconscious. We'll see how scientists demonstrate that such discrimination exists, how it can have far-reaching effects, and how to combat its effects.

Whether it's to gather the opinions of customers or employees, questionnaires are a simple, easy-to-implement solution. However, the design of a questionnaire must follow certain rules to prevent the results from being unusable or even misleading. We'll take a look at the main questions to ask when drawing up a questionnaire.

The Internet has become the most widely used source of information (especially scientific). Its use is, however, risky, and sometimes leads to false information being taken at face value. We'll take a look at some concrete examples of the risks involved in searching the Internet in an unmethodical way, and how to avoid the pitfalls that this formidable tool provides for everyone.

Any search for information, any decision made by a human being, involves risks linked to the fact that human reasoning is far from perfectly rational. A set of systematic errors (biases), distortions of logic, lead us to make flawed decisions or to persevere in the wrong direction. Knowing what these biases are can help to overcome some of them and improve decision-making processes.

Recognizing chance and determining its laws are complex mathematical problems. Yet we all have an intuitive idea of what chance is, an ability to perceive events which, because they deviate from chance, betray a will or a necessity. While this ability enables us to discover the laws of nature, and forms the very basis of statistics, it is often deceptive, leading us to see “laws” that don't exist, and to adopt irrational behavior. Our distorted view of chance can convince us that telepathy exists, that the full moon favours births or make us paranoid. We sometimes find events that are well explained by probabilities astounding. Thanks to “Bayesian” theory in psychology, we now have a better understanding of where these errors come from: man is an efficient, but limited, probabilistic animal.