Underrepresentation of female speakers at online and in-person dentistry conferences

Abstract

We investigated the representation of female speakers at online dental conferences and in-person dental conferences. Our mains were: 1) to evaluate the representation of female and male speakers at in-person and online general dentistry conferences; 2) to evaluate the representation of female and male researchers in dentistry. We located the programs of online and in-person general dentistry conferences on the Internet. We identified the gender of the speakers as female or male. The data were analyzed with a Pearson chi-squared test and a Mann Whitney U test. For the online conferences, the female speakers represented 28.0 % (n = 26), and the male speakers represented 72.0 % (n = 67). For the in-person dental conferences, the female speakers represented 21.2 % (n = 50), and the male speakers represented 78.8 % (n = 186). The female-to-male speaker proportion was 1 to 3.76 for in-person conferences and 1 to 2.58 for the online conferences. We identified 375 researchers were registered in the National Research System, with 48.8 % (n = 183) being women and 51.2 % (n = 192) men. The underrepresentation of women was present at dental conferences. The participation of female speaker increased for online conferences, but the increase did not come close to equality.