0111: Gender Equity in the Asia Pacific: Comparison of Indian and Philippines Rheumatology Conferences

Lisa S Traboco¹, Geraldine Zamora², Kavitha Mohanasundaram³, Sheila Marie Reyes⁴, Annamalai Sowndhariya⁵, Pavel Ovseiko⁶, vinod Ravindran⁷ and Latika Gupta⁸, ¹St Luke's Medical Center - BGC, Manila, Philippines, ²Philippine Rheumatology Association, Taguig City, Philippines, ³Saveetha Medical College Hospital, Chennai, India, ⁴St. Luke's Medical Center, Cainta, Philippines, ⁵MIOT Hospital, Chennai, India, ⁶John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ⁷Centre for Rheumatology, Kozhikode, Kozhikode, India, ⁸Royal Wolverhampton Trust, Wolverhampton/University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Background/Purpose: Equitable gender representation at conferences is essential to further progress in academia. India and the Philippines are both low and middle-income countries in the Asia Pacific, albeit with divergent gender norms and social frameworks. While India has a patriarchal gender norm, the Philippines has been said to have a relatively egalitarian gender norm.

Our objective is to obtain an overview of gender equity at the Philippine rheumatology (PRA) annual conferences and compare it with India (IRACON).

Methods: Using the available published PRA conference materials from 2009 to 2021, we determined the proportion of women faculty (speaker or chairperson roles). International speakers were separately identified. Gender was identifed based on information from the organizers, online science directory networks, and a gender application program interface (API) website. Results were compared with published IRACON data

Results: The overall proportion of combined PRA female faculty was 47.7% while female speakers were underrepresented at IRACON at 18%. Women were also more likely to be abstract first authors at the PRA (68%) but underrepresented at IRACON (27%). There are more females among new inductees in PRA with an M: F ratio of 1:3, while the trends are improving in India, with a notable narrowing of the gender gap among new inductees recorded (from 5:1 to 2.7:1) in the 2010 and 2015 quinquennium. The trends converged when international female faculty were analyzed at both conferences, with low representation uniformly (16% PRA, 15% IRACON)

Conclusion: We found a narrow gender gap among female speaker faculty at PRA conferences, in comparison to a much wider gender gap among speakers at IRACON. Contrastingly, the gender gap is wide among International speakers in both countries.

These trends exist despite the greater representation of women as the first authors of conference abstracts in both countries. These observations suggest that cultural and social constructs may have an important role to play, and further research on other Asia Pacific countries' gender distribution in academia is recommended.
Methodology Workflow

The proportion of Filipino Female Speakers during the PRA Annual Conference

First Authors of Abstracts
Disclosures: L. Traboco, None; G. Zamora, None; K. Mohanasundaram, None; S. Reyes, None; A. Sowndhariya, None; P. Ovseiko, None; v. Ravindran, None; L. Gupta, None.