(Reuters Health) – When Dr. Victoria Salem mentioned that she rarely heard women comment or ask questions at an otherwise gender-balanced endocrinology conference, her dinner companions at the meeting responded with incredulity.
“People at the table were laughing at me, saying: ‘What are you talking about? At least half of the delegates are women,’ ” said Salem, an endocrinologist at Imperial College London. She recalled people around the table asking, “So really, are you sure there’s a problem?”
Yes, she is sure. Six years later, Salem is the lead author of a new study in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology that proves her point. Women spoke less – significantly less – than men at the UK Society for Endocrinology’s annual national conference in 2017.
Although nearly half of the conference attendees were women, they asked less than one quarter of the questions, the study showed.
In an intervention to improve female participation at the following year’s conference, the researchers emailed organizers urging them to invite more women to chair sessions. In a separate email, they encouraged session chairs to offer the opening question to a female audience member, whenever possible.
Researchers credit the intervention with increasing the number of female session chairs from 34% in 2017 to 47% in 2018 and with increasing the proportion of females asking questions from 24% in 2017 to 35% in 2018.
“Small interventions had a big difference,” Salem told Reuters Health in an email. “The removal of all male-chaired sessions will clearly help.”
“I loved how simple their intervention was,” said Dr. Erin Brown, a pediatric surgeon at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. Every medical association could easily have more women chair conference sessions and try to offer the first question to a woman, said Brown, who was not involved with the study.
In 2019, Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, called for the end of “the tradition in science of all-male speaking panels, sometimes wryly referred to as ‘manels.'” (https://bit.ly/3lKI6D9)
Brown believes the tradition persists nonetheless, although the pandemic’s cancellation of in-person conferences makes it difficult to judge the effectiveness of Collins’ appeal.
“It is a known fact that there are less women on the panels and chairing the sessions,” Brown said in a phone interview. “I’m sure this applies here in the U.S. and in all specialties, and especially in surgery.”
Dr. Carol K. Bates, a primary-care doctor and associate dean for faculty affairs at Harvard Medical School in Boston, is less convinced that men continue to dominate medical conferences. She hasn’t noticed the phenomena at Society of General Internal Medicine conferences, she said in a phone interview.
“I’m not suggesting that the phenomena doesn’t exist,” said Bates, who was not involved with the study. “I’m just suggesting there are organizations that have been working on this for awhile.”
Bates also questioned the researchers’ ability to identify the gender of speakers based on audio recordings.
“They’re making assumptions about somebody’s gender based on the sound of their voice,” she said, calling gender assumptions a “significant limitation to the science of the study.”
Bates and Brown both also questioned how reading written transcripts could allow researchers to gauge levels of empathy. The researchers said they had “blindly judged” questions from female audience members to be more empathic than questions from men.
The study also found that men were 10 times more likely than women to open their questions with a statement of scientific fact, a finding Salem called “striking.” She said the scientific assertion usually came from a male commenter’s own research findings.
“This speaks to me about the true nature of questions and comments at conferences,” Salem said. “Women seem much less likely to use these opportunities as platforms to self-promote or assert their expertise.”
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/37iBGlS The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, July 29, 2021.