Abstract
Purpose :
To evaluate the population of academic glaucoma specialists in the United States and identify the demographic shifts across the nation over the past few decades.
Methods :
This is a retrospective observational study of currently active glaucoma specialists working in 122 academic institutions with ophthalmology residency. The demographic information was obtained from publicly available data from university websites. Members were profiled for gender, academic rank, geographic location, and years since board certification (certification age). Relationship between gender and academic rank and the geographical region was evaluated. The percentage of male and female glaucoma specialists in academia was also assessed over time.
Results :
409 Glaucoma specialists were included in our database. Of these, 164 (40%) were female and 245 (60%) were male. The highest certification age identified was 55 years (1964), while the lowest was 0 (2019). Our analysis showed a significant association between gender and academic rank with a larger number of males with professor ranking (p = <0.005). There was no significant association between gender and the geographic region of the glaucoma specialists (p=0.2990). The certification age of female glaucoma specialists (mean = 11.5) was significantly smaller than male specialists (mean = 18.8)(p = <0.0001). There was a positive growth in the ratio of female to male specialists who were recently board-certified with a significantly larger percentage of females observed in those who were certified more recently (Fig. 1).
Conclusions :
The percentage of women glaucoma specialists has steadily increased in the past 25 years; in fact, there are more women than men among those glaucoma specialists who were board certified within the past five years, and this trend is observed in all regions of the US.
This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.