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On increasing the visibility of women and other groups underrepresented in medicine

The composition of speakers' rosters at medical conferences is receiving increasing attention as awareness of inequities in representation in medicine grows. In 2019, the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, publicly declared that he would no longer accept speaking invitations to panels that were composed solely of men, or so-called manels.1 Turning the focus to neurology, Singhal and colleagues,2 the authors of “Representation of Women Plenary Speakers at the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting” in this issue of Neurology®, present data on the gender representation of plenaries sessions over the last 6 decades at the American Academy of Neurology's (AAN’s) Annual Meeting. Analysis of the data provided reveal a nonequitable representation of women among the plenary speakers for the majority of the years studied, with a notable increase in representation more recently, especially for the years 2017 to 2019. A striking finding was that for 33 years (1958–1990), there were zero women speakers in any plenary session. While improvements were made from 1990 to 2016, the presence of women plenary speakers was noncommensurate with the number of women neurologists or women AAN members.2 These striking inequities echo previous scholarly work revealing disparities in nearly every aspect of the practice of neurology, from compensation3 and academic rank4 to recognition awards5 and burnout.6,7