Gender inequity in leadership positions in spinal societies worldwide

Orthopaedics and Neurosurgery rank as the worst with regards to the percentage of female residents. This trend carries on in spinal subspeciality training. The gap in gender equity increases significantly in academic leadership positions, including department chairs and full-time faculty, as well as speakers and faculty at conferences. The purpose of our study was to analyze the percentage of female representation in the leadership of spinal societies globally.

We evaluated the current leadership teams of national and international spine societies and recorded the percentage of females.

We studied gender data of 73 spinal societies worldwide. 36 out of these had no female representation. Overall, 148 out of 1977 (7.5%) leadership positions were occupied by females. European Spine societies had the best gender ratio (16.9%), followed by North America (7.2%). Asia Pacific region had the worst gender ratio (1.2%). Middle East/Africa region and South America performed marginally better with 2.8% and 3.1%, respectively.

Diversity improves innovation and quality of patient care. Female spinal surgeon leaders serve as role models and mentors. More needs to be done by our spinal societies to address gender disparity. Our article will provide data on an important aspect of gender disparity in spine surgery so that corrective measures can be initiated. There is an enormous gender disparity in leadership positions in spine societies worldwide. This phenomenon was observed across all regions, with Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific regions recording the largest gender discrepancy.