Abstract
Background: Achieving gender equity in academic hematology requires a multifaceted approach across all presentation types and research fields. Prior work has looked at gender disparities at ASH at the macro-level, focusing on gender disparities in speaker roles. We aimed to examine trends in gender disparities in accepted ASH submissions across 2019-2024 with a retrospective analysis by submission type and submission subcategory.
Methods: Data from publicly available ASH works from 2019 to 2024 was analyzed from the ASH website, including first author, submission type (limited to oral abstracts, poster abstracts, and online-only publications), and presentation subcategory (divided into nine different subjects per ASH). Names were genderized using the public web-tool Namsor; for names that could not be predicted, manual review was attempted to identify gender by physical presentation on institutional websites. A Python script was written to categorize gender proportions by year, submission type, and presentation subject as well as perform appropriate statistical tests.
Results: We identified a total of 29453 accepted ASH submissions across 2019-2024. Over these years, the male-prevalence in first-authorship remained about the same, ranging from 50.8% to 52.0%. Most recently, male-prevalence was 50.8% in 2024, down from 51.3% in 2023. Focusing on submission type, we identified that oral abstracts had consistently and statistically significantly higher male-prevalence in all years, ranging from 54.9%-57.9%. when compared to online-only abstracts, where average male-prevalence was 50.5% (Two-proportion z-test comparing total proportion of males in oral abstracts, 2961/5223, vs online-only publications, 3874/7675, p<0.001). Male prevalence in poster abstracts was also close to equal at 51.5%. No consistent trend of increasing or decreasing prevalence was noted among these three presentation types.
Gender disparities in subcategories were then identified. We found that Transfusion Medicine and Red Cell Physiology and Disorders were the most female-prevalent fields with 55.9% and 55.3% of first-authors being female, respectively. On the other hand, we found that the subcategories of Gene Therapies, Chemical Biology, and Emerging Diagnostics, as well as 700s - Transplantation and Adoptive Cell Therapies, were the most male-prevalent fields, with 57.5% and 54.9% of first-authors being male.
Conclusions: Gender disparities in ASH first-authorship have been consistently low over all abstracts in the past six years. However, there still exists differences in specific presentation types, where there is continued male prevalence in oral abstracts when compared to other presentation types. Further, different subcategories had varying gender disparities. Although there has been significant progress in gender disparities among ASH submitted works, these areas with continued disparities warrant further investigation and targeted measures to create parity across all aspects of hematology research.
