Gender diversity at spine surgery academic conferences: a 15-year investigation

Enhancing gender diversity at academic conferences is critical for advancing women's representation and career trajectories in spine surgery.

To discover trends in women's representation at major spine conferences over a 15-year period.

Conference records from the 2007-2021 annual meetings of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, North American Spine Society, and Scoliosis Research Society (SRS).

Authors of spine-related presentations.

Authorship by gender.

Retrospective bibliometric analysis with univariate and multivariate modeling to identify trends and predictors of gender diversity.

Among 8,948 presentations, 750 (8.4%) had female first authors and 618 (6.9%) had female senior authors. There was no change in rates of female first authorship (p=.41) or senior authorship (p=.88) over time. The strongest predictors of female first authorship were having a female senior author (OR 7.32, p<.001), and delivering presentations at SRS (OR 1.95, p=.001). Factors negatively associated with female first authorship included poster format (OR 0.82, p=.039) and conference location in the United States/Canada (OR 0.76, p=.045). Similar trends were encountered for senior authorship. Productivity per senior author was similar between genders (p=.160); whereas a gender gap in productivity per first author during 2007 to 2011 (p=.020) equalized by 2017 to 2021 (p=.300). Among the 10 most productive authors of each gender, male authors delivered more presentations, but all authors shared similar format, content, and location.

Women's representation in spine-related presentations did not increase at three major conferences over a 15-year period. Our findings regarding the positive effects of female mentorship, and international or virtual venues merit further investigation to address the gender gap. The upstream pipeline of recruiting women into academic spine surgery also needs to be addressed.