Quality at the American Society for Radiation Oncology Annual Meeting: Gender Balance Among Invited Speakers and Associations with Panel Success.

PURPOSE The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) annual meeting is the most prominent international conference in radiation oncology. It represents one of the greatest time efforts for ASTRO volunteers, and the quality of the annual meeting is a high priority. Measures of diversity have been linked with quality of academic efforts. We conducted a study of gender diversity of the ASTRO invited speakers, focusing on speaker and panel characteristics, and associations of these characteristics with measures of audience satisfaction. METHODS AND MATERIALS We created a database of all invited speakers (n = 1499 cumulative speaking positions, n = 725 individual speakers) and panels (n = 381) in the ASTRO annual meetings from 2012 to 2016. Speaker characteristics were acquired using publically available online search tools (including Scopus for citation metrics). SAS software was used for statistical analysis. RESULTS Of the 725 individual speakers, 27% were women. Men had higher median Hirsch index (H-index) (27 vs 20, P 50% female (metric: request for session repeat). Female conveners were associated with greater panel gender diversity. CONCLUSION Given observations that women constitute a minority of invited speakers and that greater female representation correlates with a key panel success metric, efforts to ensure greater diversity of those included in AM speaking invitations merit serious attention.