Representation of women in speaking roles at annual surgical society meetings.

Background: Women are disproportionately underrepresented in American academic surgery and surgical society leadership; we investigated the proportion of speaking roles held by women across a wide variety of surgical society meetings.

Methods: Publicly-available data on invited speakers, panelists, and moderators at 23 national surgical societies' annual meetings from 2002 to 2019 were collected. Mixed effects logistic regression was used to evaluate the adjusted trend of gender representation over time for each role.

Results: 15.9% of invited speakers were women. Adjusted analysis showed an 8% increase in odds of having female speakers per year (OR1.08, p = 0.002, 95%CI 1.03-1.14). 24.4% of moderators and 22.5% of panelists were female; there was increasing trend in adjusted analysis for both moderators (OR1.09, p < 0.001, 95%CI 1.07-1.11) and panelists (OR1.13, p < 0.001, 95%CI 1.11-1.43).

Conclusions: There is a wide range in speaking roles held by women at surgical society meetings, but an encouraging trend towards greater parity was seen overall.