INSIDE-OUT: Introduction of Speakers at IDWeek Events-Observing for Unconscious Bias Over Time

Specialty societies, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, strive to address gender and racial inequities in professional advancement. Microaggressions remain a persistent and pervasive barrier to these goals. Nonprofessional speaker introductions are a manifestation of race- and gender-based microaggressions, which have not been previously assessed at IDWeek. We assessed disparities in speaker introductions at IDWeek over a 7-year period that included formal gender equity initiatives introduced in 2016.

We conducted a retrospective observational study of video-recorded IDWeek speaker introductions from 2013 to 2019. Trained coders reviewed presentation video archives to assess a primary outcome of nonprofessional introductions: when a speaker's professional title was not used as the first introduction. We used descriptive statistics, Fisher exact tests, Cochrane-Armitage trend tests, and multivariable logistic regression to characterize relationships between speaker introductions and presentation year, speaker demographics, and speaker-moderator demographic concordance.

Of 1940 videos reviewed, 48.9% of IDWeek speakers received nonprofessional introductions during and before 2016 vs 41.5% of speakers after 2016 (P = .0013). There was an increasing linear trend in the frequency of professional introductions by speaker age group from 47.1% for age <40 years to 65.3% for age >60 years (P < .0001). White moderators more frequently used nonprofessional introductions than moderators from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine (47.7% vs 29.1%, P = .0014). Women-men speaker-moderator pairs had more nonprofessional introductions (54.6%, P < .001).

In the largest assessment of microaggressions in speaker introductions at a national medical specialty conference, we highlighted some progress over time and ample opportunity to further standardize equitable speaker introductions, especially for women and junior speakers.