Equal representation remains elusive
The study does suggest some notable gains. In a previous study of 181 academic conferences in the United States and Canada between 2007 and 2017, the rate of women speakers was only 15%, compared with 37.7% in the new study.
And an overall trend analysis in the study shows an approximately 10% increase in representation of women in all of the board reviews. However, only the ASH hematology board review achieved more than 50% women in their two courses.
“Overall, the proportion of women speakers is improving over the years, though it remains suboptimal,” Dr. Al Hadidi said.
The authors noted that oncology is clearly not the only specialty with gender disparities. They documented a lack of women speakers at conferences involving otolaryngology head and neck meetings, radiation oncology, emergency medicine, and research conferences.
They pointed to the work of ASH’s Women in Hematology Working Group as an important example of the needed effort to improve the balance of women hematologists.
courtesy Penn Medicine
Dr. Ariela Marshall
Ariela Marshall, MD, director of women’s thrombosis and hemostasis at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia and a leader of ASH’s Women in Hematology Working Group, agreed that more efforts are needed to address both gender disparities as well as those of early career speakers. She asserted that the two disparities appear to be connected.
“If you broke down gender representation over time and the faculty/time since initial certification, the findings may mirror the percent of women in hematology-oncology at that given point in time,” Dr. Marshall said in an interview.
“If an institution is truly committed to taking action on gender equity, it needs to look at gender and experience equity of speakers,” she said. “Perhaps it’s the time to say ‘Dr. X has been doing this review course for 15 years. Let’s give someone else a chance.’
“This is not even just from a gender equity perspective but from a career development perspective overall,” she added. “Junior faculty need these speaking engagements a lot more than senior faculty.”
Meanwhile, the higher number of female trainees is a trend that ideally will be sustained as those trainees move into positions of leadership, Dr. Marshall noted.
“We do see that over time, we have achieved gender equity in the percent of women matriculating to medical school. And my hope is that, 20 years down the line, we will see the effects of this reflected in increased equity in leadership positions such as division/department chair, dean, and hospital CEO,” she said. “However, we have a lot of work to do because there are still huge inequities in the culture of medicine (institutional and more broadly), including gender-based discrimination, maternal discrimination, and high attrition rates for women physicians, compared to male physicians.
“It’s not enough to simply say ‘well, we have fixed the problem because our incoming medical student classes are now equitable in gender distribution,’ ”
The authors and Dr. Marshall had no disclosures to report.