The Society of Abdominal Radiology has committed to being a diverse and equitable organization with equitable access to opportunities to all members regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, race, physical characteristics, faith, religion, ethnicity, practice setting and all other identities. The society’s Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts include analysis of current trends in gender and race-based diversity of society activities and this analysis focused on gender and race representation in plenary session speakers for the annual meetings held between the years 2016 and 2020, prior to the inception of the SAR Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Plenary sessions offer increased visibility of individuals from underrepresented groups and are an important avenue for demonstrating the society’s commitment.

Our results show the women made up a smaller proportion of plenary speakers at each of the 5 annual meetings evaluated prior to 2020. When averaged over the 5-year period, women accounted for 30.4% (80) of the 263 total speakers. Women account for 36% of the overall society membership. Thus, our results indicate that women have been underrepresented as plenary speakers, although the difference compared with overall membership did not reach statistical significance in our analysis. We were unable to reliably identify any of the presenters as transgender, gender non-binary or gender expansive. This data identifies potential area our society can focus efforts, making a conscientious effort to offer females, transgender, gender non-binary and gender expansive speakers the opportunity to present in plenary sessions. Speaker diversity promotes wider recruitment by providing audience members with successful role models in the field and enhances the careers of the speakers as well [8, 17]. Additionally, transgender and gender expansive members of the society should be encouraged to self-identify and work with the diversity committee to identify avenues for participation in the society’s activities [15].

Our results are similar to other studies that have been published analyzing representation of women in plenary session speakers for conferences and medical society meetings. Arora et al. analyzed 8535 sessions with 23,440 speakers across 98 conferences and women accounted for only 30% speakers [16]. Larson et al. evaluated speaker gender disparity in medical specialty conferences from 2013 and 2017 and found that only about 25% of speakers were women and these differences were significant when compared with physician workforce data available from Association of American Medical Colleges' (AAMC) [18]. Similar trends are observed in conferences of other specialties such as surgery, orthopedic surgery, critical care and urology [19,20,21]. Ghatan et al. studied the gender representation trends in Society of Interventional Radiology and found that targeted interventions such as having a woman as a session coordinator increased female speaker participation, suggesting that the inclusion of more women as coordinators is a potential mechanism for achieving gender balance at scientific meetings [8].

Based on our race analysis, White speakers were more frequently plenary speakers compared to other ethnicities over the 5 years analyzed in this study. The next most frequent race was Asian, although, there was a substantial difference in the proportion of Asian compared to White speakers. A small and increasing representation of multiracial plenary speakers was noted over 2018 to 2020. No plenary speakers could be identified as Black or African American. Self-reported race data from the society membership is unavailable at the time and hence a reliable comparison with membership racial distribution was not possible. This identifies another area where focused efforts are needed to increase involvement of URM in SAR. Pipeline issues can be particularly important here to increase the engagement of URM with SAR activities starting at early stages of their careers [17, 22, 23].

Overall, establishing a diversity and inclusion committee is a promising effort by SAR; as Prabhu et al. noted a lack of public support of membership diversity by many North American radiology societies, especially those with fewer members. As noted in this publication, the SAR Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has a publicly accessible diversity mission, with identified leaders and committee members [24]. Per Prabhu et al., identified "diversity leaders" can serve as models for societies aiming to establish their commitment to diversity and inclusion [24]. The committee notes active members on its website, including additional resources on career development, leading diverse teams, health care disparities and how to get involved with SAR.

Limitations of our study include the lack of self-reported data and demographics assessement by the authors, which is subject to bias. However, this methodology has been previously employed by other authors performing similar research [16]. No speakers could be reliably identified as transgender, gender non-binary or gender expansive. Overall, unfortunately, there is very little information available on inclusion of transgender or gender expansive individuals in radiology [15]. Similarly, race characteristics were assessed by reviewers and not self-reported by the plenary session speakers. This can certainly introduce bias in the presented data. The most accurate methodology will be to collect self-reported data from SAR members and speakers. The SAR has initiatives in place to gather this data at the time of membership renewal and speaker confirmation. However, self-reporting is not mandatory to allow people the necessary freedom to choose how to report their demographic identifiers. This indeed is a work in progress and this initial analysis will allow us to identify deficiencies of current identification processes and allow for a framework to build an equitable society in the future. The authors also acknowledge that current United States census categories may not be entirely complete and can be modified in the future as the knowledge on diversity expands.

For comparison with the overall demographics of our society, only gender-based data is currently available. Race information is unavailable. The committee is aware of this limitation and as detailed above has launched efforts to gather self-reported data on gender, race and ethnicity. This has been included in the questionnaire associated with the annual membership renewal process and at the time of speaker confirmation. Going forward plenary session speakers will be asked to provide their demographic identifiers.