Women are well represented in influential positions such as invited speakers and session chairs at Australia’s major respiratory medicine conference but international meetings have some catching up to do.
According to an Australian-led study published in the European Respiratory Journal, almost half of invited speakers (49%) and session chairs (46%) at the 2018 TSANZ ASM meeting were female.
This compared favourably to 35% and 45% respectively at the BTS Winter Meeting in 2017 and 23% and 31% at the ERS Congress in 2017.
The study authors said the policies of each specialist society regarding gender balance may partially explain the differences in women’s participation between the three conferences.
“While the TSANZ has a specific policy of gender balance for invited plenary speakers, it is unknown if the ERS and BTS have similar policies.”
“Importantly these results would suggest that both stringent policies advocating for gender balance in conference leadership roles, and women holding leadership positions within each society, are extremely important to close the current gender gap.”
The study also found that, in pooled results from the three meetings, more women were first authors on poster and oral presentations (1732 women v 1562 men).
However significantly more men were listed as last authors on presentations – “with this position representing the most senior member of the research team”.
The authors, including Associate Professor Natasha Smallwood from the Department of Respiratory & Sleep Medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, said the reasons why a gender gap appears and widens significantly as the conference role becomes more senior and prestigious, were likely multifactorial.
Notably, the issue of fewer women in senior research roles was not isolated to respiratory medicine.