Emily S. Redler, B.S., University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Isabella K. Pallotto, B.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mimi Webb, B.S., University of South Carolina
Brien Culhane, Davidson College ’22
Laura E. Sockol, Ph.D., Davidson College
Background
Evaluations of women’s participation in the annual meetings of the Association for Behavioral & Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) have consistently found that women are underrepresented in leadership positions and prestigious conference roles. In contrast, women are overrepresented in early-career roles. In 2019, the majority of ABCT’s members (70%) were female. This is consistent with the demographics of the field of clinical psychology, in which 80% of advanced degrees are awarded to women. The continued underrepresentation of women in advanced positions is consistent with the “leaky pipeline” hypothesis: although women enter the field, they are less likely to advance to higher-level roles. Using data from ABCT’s 2019 meeting in Atlanta, GA, we replicated previous assessments of women’s participation across conference roles and evaluated changes in women’s representation over the last five years of annual meetings (2015-2019).
Method
Using the 2019 program guide, we coded the gender of participants in each conference role (e.g., symposium discussant, chair, and author) using first names, supplemented with publicly available autobiographical information when necessary. We compared the proportion of women in each role to the overall proportion of female meeting participants and compared women’s participation in 2019 to previously collected data from the 2015-2018 annual meetings.
Results
The proportion of female participants in the 2019 annual meeting (70%) was comparable to their representation as members of ABCT. In most conference roles, women’s representation did not differ significantly from their overall conference participation. Women were overrepresented as first authors of posters (79%***). However, women were underrepresented in seven roles: symposium authors (65%**), panelists (64%†), workshop leaders (56%†), symposium discussants (53%***), institute leaders (47%*), master clinician seminars (42%*), and invited speakers (20%*). Of the 22 awards conferred in 2019, 41% were awarded to women.
Over time, women have represented a greater proportion of conference participants (2015: 66%, 2016: 68%, 2017: 69%, 2018: 70%, 2019: 70%). However, the increasing representation of women has not been linear or consistent across all conference roles. There has been a significant increase in the proportion of women participating in clinical roundtables (as moderators and panelists) and panels from 2015 through 2019. However, from 2018 to 2019, the proportion of female invited speakers, panel moderators, and leaders of clinical intervention trainings, institutes, and master clinician seminars decreased by 10% or more.
Discussion
Although women comprise an increasing proportion of members of ABCT and clinical psychologists, they continue to be underrepresented in prestigious and advanced roles. ABCT must continue its efforts to support women’s advancement beyond the graduate level. In 2019, two panels addressed issues related to retaining and mentoring women. Despite standing-room-only attendance, there were very few men in the audience. As Dr. Simon Rego Tweeted, “We must continue this important conversation next year — in a bigger room & with more men!”
A Note on Methodology
The use of authors’ first names as an indicator of gender has been widely used to assess gender differences in publication, such as the representation of women as first and senior authors (e.g., Hart, Frangou & Perlis, 2019), citation impact (e.g., Thelwall, 2020), and whether studies include evaluations of sex/gender differences (e.g., Nielsen, Andersen, Schiebinger & Schnneider, 2017). In the United States, forenames tend to be highly gendered, and the majority of names are given nearly exclusively to boys or girls (as indicated by the child’s sex assigned at birth). Thus, when information regarding authors’ self-identified gender is not available, it has become common to infer authors’ gender identity from their first names, either using human raters (e.g., McSweeney, Donahoe & Swindell, 2000) or machine learning approaches (e.g., Santamaríía & Mihaljević, 2018).
Although this approach is common, this methodology has also been criticized. We acknowledge that this methodology has significant limitations. Although most names are strongly associated with a single gender, a minority of names are unisex (given to children assigned both male and female with comparable frequency during the same period of time), and not all children who are given highly-gendered names are assigned the sex to which the name commonly corresponds (e.g., “A Boy Named Sue”). This approach also provides no means by which to evaluate the presence of non-binary authors and others whose identities do not correspond with oversimplified conceptualizations of gender that assume that all individuals have a single, stable gender identity that can reliably be classified in one of two categories.
In the absence of feasible alternatives for determining the gender of authors and individuals in other roles in the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, we have chosen to use this approach as a way to generate valuable information regarding women’s participation in the organization over time. We were excited to see that ABCT asked authors to self-report gender identity for this year’s virtual conference, and hope that this data will be collected in future years at the point of submission. We welcome suggestions for ways to improve our approach to this work, and would be excited to develop collaborations that would help us address the limitations of our current methodology.
