A Wake up call for Academic Surgery

There may never be a better opportunity for surgeons to consider how to bring about radical change in order to better represent the public we serve. The paper published by Seehra et al brings into stark reality the lack of ethnic and gender diversity in presenters at the leading prize sessions of two major surgical conferences in the United Kingdom: the Patey prize (Surgical Research Society, SRS) and the Moynihan prize (Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, ASGBI). Of 442 presenters over the last 20 years, 211 of them were White males (47.7%), 112 were Asian males (25.3%), and one Black male presented (0.23%); 85 women presented their work (19%), 16 of these women were Asian and one was Black [1]. These do not represent the numbers of women in surgical training (45%), but lie closer to the percentage of consultant female surgeons currently working in the United Kingdom (14%). The percentage of senior female academic surgeons is considerably lower.