Abstract
Purpose :
Despite increasing numbers of women entering the field of ophthalmology, many subspecialties still lack gender parity among their society membership, and significant disparities persist among leadership positions and in the upper ranks of academia. We aim to evaluate male and female representation as members, awardees, executive committee members, and presidents of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus (AAPOS) to understand recent trends in gender diversity within pediatric ophthalmology.
Methods :
A retrospective, longitudinal study using publicly available data from AAPOS online archives and member directories from 2000 – 2020. Primary outcomes included percentage of women as new members, award winners, and leadership positions (executive committee, president). Secondary outcomes included total membership and the proportional representation of men and women, calculated by dividing the number of men and women at a given benchmark by the total number of men and women in the organization.
Results :
Over the past two decades, AAPOS achieved total membership parity with 52.0% women and 48.0% men, p=0.087 (Figure 1). Furthermore, AAPOS demonstrated significant growth in the representation of women as new members (50.1% to 59.8%, p=0.001) and in the percent of female award winners between the two decades (23.1% to 39.9%, p=0.005), but no significant difference in the percent of female executive committee members or presidents (Table 1). Moreover, the proportion of women who won awards by 2020 was significantly less than that of male awardees (8.6% vs. 19.3%, p<0.001), and the proportion of female executive committee members was less than that of men holding such roles (7.7% vs. 15.4%, p=0.004). There was no significant difference between the proportion of men and women as presidents (0.6% vs. 1.6%, p=0.070) (Figure 1).
Conclusions :
AAPOS has demonstrated significant growth in female membership and award recognition over the last 20 years; however, gaps still exist between men and women as award winners and executive committee members. This phenomenon demonstrates that the “wait and watch” approach to diversity is not sufficient to achieve gender parity at all levels of an organization. Targeted interventions such as addressing implicit bias, amending promotion criteria to recognize more varied achievements, and diverse nomination slates are needed to close this gender gap.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.