14479 Lorang Felix

Tagged in Miscellaneous

Gender distribution among invited speakers in comparison to presenters at the scientific program of EUSEM 2017 in Athens 

Background:

In Emergency Medicine as in many other medical specialties the number of female speakers at major conferences is considerably lower than male speakers. At previous EUSEM-conferences the female proportion was as low as 21-22.5%. During the EUSEM congress in 2017 significantly more male speakers presented as keynote or invited speakers. However, the proportion of female speaker in the research track seemed to be higher. As the female to male ratio in both segments clearly should be similar, we wanted to find out if there are any differences.

Methods:
We collected the data of the speakers and abstract presenters at EUSEM 2017 retrospectively. We looked specifically at gender and country of origin and compared the different mixture of the invited speakers and speaker at the scientific presentations.

Results:
In summary, there have been 347 Invited Speakers (including Moderators), of these were only 96 female speakers (27.67%), yet as many as 251 male Speakers (72.33%). In comparison at the scientific program we had 271 Oral presentations (including moderators) including 122 by female speakers (45.02%) compared to 149 male speakers (54.98%). Compared with the T test, the signal strength was 0.35.

Conclusion:
Retrospectively we can confirm the hypothesis that more male speakers were invited to present at the EUSEM conference though gender wise one would expect nowadays an equally distributed field of presenters. At the scientific program this goal has already been reached, almost as many women as men presented their research results.

This result shows clear potential for improvement in balancing the gender gap when inviting speakers for the show program at EUSEM congresses.