Gender of Abstract Presenters at the Annual Meetings of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists and American Society of Anesthesiologists: 2016 to 2020

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess gender in abstract poster presentations at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists (SCA) and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Annual Meetings from 2016 through 2020 to determine possible gender disparities in anesthesia overall as compared to cardiothoracic anesthesia.

Design: A bibliometric study SETTING: Publicly available data from the SCA and ASA websites.

Participants: Presenting and senior authors of abstracts at the SCA and ASA Annual Meetings.

Interventions: None.

Measurements and main results: Abstract data on presenting and senior authors were collected for the years 2016 through 2020 for both annual meetings. Observed gender of abstract authors was compared to expected gender based on the gender distribution of cardiac anesthesiologists for the SCA or of all anesthesiologists for the ASA. From 2016 to 2020, the proportion of women senior authors on abstracts was significantly underrepresented (2016-2019, p < 0.05). At the SCA meetings, there was no significant difference in the observed versus expected proportion of women presenting and senior authors. The percentage of woman physicians' abstract-presenting authors at the ASA was overrepresented compared to the expected proportion for each year (2016-2020, p < 0.001).

Conclusion: At the SCA, women were appropriately represented as both presenting and senior abstract authors. At the ASA, there was significant overrepresentation of women as presenting authors and underrepresentation of women as senior authors. These results suggested that abstract presentation is not a barrier to academic advancement.

Keywords: abstract presentation; anesthesiologist; cardiothoracic anesthesiology; gender disparities.