Narjust Duma, MD, is a thoracic oncologist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, in Madison, Wisconsin. She is an expert in lung cancer management, sex differences in immunotherapy outcomes, workplace diversity and inclusion, and patient inclusiveness in clinical trials.

DrDuma and colleagues evaluated gender bias in American Society of ClinicalOncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting speaker introductions from past meetings(including presentations from 2017 and 2018) and she along with Miriam A.Knoll, MD, presented their teams findings at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting.1The results of the study were also published in theJournal ofClinical Oncology (JCO).2

Cancer Therapy Advisorsat down with Dr Duma to get the detailsabout what spurred her to investigate gender bias in oncology, and to learn alittle bit about how speaker ethnicity and nationality may also influence howoncologists are being presented to peers. In addition, Dr Duma spoke about howgender and ethnicity may influence medical school enrollment and theappointment of faculty anddivision chair positions.

This interviewhas been edited for clarity.

Cancer Therapy Advisor (CTA): What prompted your study of gender bias in ASCO Annual Meeting speaker introductions?

Dr Duma: In 2018, I was [attending] the last day of ASCO, which was a Tuesday. Usually half the people at the meeting already go home after Monday. I was in a talk where the speaker the only one for that session was a full professor and was an expert on the field. When the time came to introduce her an expert with numerous honors and everything she was introduced as Julie. And I was like, uh.why is she [just] Julie? Everybody else is Dr so-and-so. That day, I put a poll on Twitter, just to see if I was the only one to pick up on it.

The response was quite overwhelming. A lot of people, including men, answered that yes, we have seen [this happen]. So then I went to ESMO [European Society for Medical Oncology], which is the largest European conference for oncology, and a renowned doctor there was winning the biggest award one can get at ESMO; a woman who has several PhD [degrees] and many honors. During her 10-minute introduction, the speaker omitted her professional title and referred to her as Mrs last name. And everybody before her and after her was introduced as doctor.

I got in touch with our senior author, Dr Miriam Knoll, and we embarked on this study. We watched all of the videos from the 2017 and 2018 [ASCO annual] meetings, [accompanied by] all the transcripts.

CTA: In your teams paper,1 you mentioned recenttrends of improving representation of women in medical school enrollment, butalso persisting gender disparities in faculty and division chair positions.

Dr Duma: Back in the day, women were not allowed to enroll in medicalschool. But that changed about 172 years ago, when Dr Elizabeth Blackwell wasaccepted as a medical student by Hobart College (then called Geneva MedicalCollege), located in Upstate New York.

Now we have more women in medical school than men (approximately 52% of medical school enrollees), but we still have a lag-time bias. The majority of the senior leaders are men. We also see that the system has not been friendly to female doctors. We have a leaky pipe problem. Women encounter so many challenges that we decide to go on to private practice or specialties that are more friendly. Probably because there werent that many women going into medical school 40 years ago and also because things like speaker introductions creates an environment thats not female friendly.

Fighting unconscious bias and gender equity can be exhausting. Particularly in the case of minorities in medicine, who also need to deal with daily microaggressions in the workplace. This leads to career changes away from academic medicine.

Read more:
Gender Bias in Oncology: Q&A With Dr Narjust Duma - Cancer Therapy Advisor