Gender representation in leadership and speaking roles at rehabilitation medicine conferences in the UK: a 26-year analysis.

The early years are thin. Gender could be identified for only 53% of participants in 2000 and identification was significantly lower in 2000-2005 than in later periods, and the 2023 programme was reconstructed from video recordings so it may be incomplete. Gender was worked out from public material rather than asked of participants. 186 named participants (15%) could not be identified and were dropped, and the authors accept that some of the rest may have been misclassified. People with a thinner online presence were less likely to be identified at all, and the authors note that female academic physicians are less likely than male peers to have high online visibility, so this bias may have fallen disproportionately on women. The workforce comparison is not like for like. These meetings draw people from other specialties and allied health professions with different gender mixes, physiotherapy and nursing being predominantly female, so the consultant figures are only an approximate benchmark. Poster and platform slots depend on people submitting their own work, which adds a self-selection step, and the study looked at gender alone rather than ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic status or sexuality.

The authors declared that no financial support was received for this work or its publication. The researchers who classified gender were all co-authors or collaborators on the paper, and one of those authors was themselves in the dataset and reported their own gender rather than being classified from public sources.

Do not read this as women being shut out of rehabilitation medicine conferences. Men held more roles than an even split would predict, but against the actual consultant workforce, an average of 70% men and 30% women over the period, women appeared significantly more often than expected in every role category. The chairing gap against an even split (p = 0.02) also stops being significant once the correction for eight comparisons is applied.