“To achieve greater success with our efforts toward speaker diversity, we will need to receive many Open Call applications for 2024 from female and other diverse members.”
– Lynne Thomas Gordon, AAO Chief Executive Officer

The AAO’s multi-year effort to increase gender diversity among Annual Session speakers is producing positive results.

Currently driving change is a new speaker selection process instituted for the 2023 Annual Session by the AAO Committee on Conferences (CCON). The goals of the new process include not just increasing speaker demographic diversity, but also attracting new talent to AAO programs and providing improved, exclusive and differentiated CE to attendees.

CCON*, established in 2020, is charged with planning all future AAO meetings starting with the 2023 Winter Conference. Their work fulfills the role previously filled by individual meeting planning committees.

Last year, CCON introduced a new process designed to help increase the committee’s awareness of well-qualified speakers who might have been overlooked in the past. The AAO distributed an online Open Call portal worldwide, with interested parties applying to speak at the 2023 Annual Session via the online portal.

Results of the completed pilot Open Call process are positive: 88 percent of speakers who were selected by CCON to speak at the 2023 Annual Session applied via the speakers’ application portal. CCON members found that using the Open Call process helped remove bias in selecting speakers and enabled viewing of the full complement of speakers who applied and data concerning applicants, via one easy-to-access repository.  

Speakers are currently signing contracts and finalizing lecture titles, with finalized information about the 2023 Annual Session CE program to appear online this fall. Preliminary data indicate the 2023 Annual Session will feature:

● 25.2% female speakers. The percentage includes all CE content categories, which are also changing for the 2023 Annual Session to include Innovations & Tech Talk, Scientific Advances, Clinical Techniques, Business Success and Inspiration & Well-Being. In the Scientific Advances and Clinical Techniques categories exclusively, the combined percentage of female speakers will be 25.5%.

● 26.2% new speakers, also across all content categories. Work toward increasing diversity of speakers will continue via the Open Call process for 2024 meetings (see below for details). CCON is committed to ongoing strong support of these efforts.

Addressing Speaker Diversity Has Been a Multi-Year Effort
In 2018, when the AAO House of Delegates first established the Task Force on Women Orthodontists (now Special Committee on Women Orthodontists), a key focus of the group was identifying ways to being greater representation of female speakers to each year’s Annual Session.

“While we knew there were many women in the specialty who were well-qualified to lecture at a meeting like Annual Session, there were few women’s names on the Doctors Program lecture schedule,” Dr. Valerie Martone, SCWO past Chair, told the eBulletin.

The SCWO team began working with Annual Session Planning Committees to identify ways to recruit qualified female speakers while CCON prepared to begin its work on the 2023 meetings. As a result, the percentage of women speaking in Doctors Program lectures increased from 13% at the 2018 Annual Session to 22% at the 2022 meeting.

The AAO considers the issue of gender diversity to be important in part because member demographics have been changing rapidly. In 2015, women were 24% of all North American active, life and military AAO members. The percentage of female residents was 47.5. This year, 34.8% of practicing North American members are women, with 56.9% of residents being female.

“As part of the AAO’s commitment to inclusion and engagement, we want to be sure that we are providing everyone with professional speaking opportunities as members advance in their careers and are ready for these high-profile activities,” says AAO Chief Executive Officer Lynne Thomas Gordon. “As women increasingly make up a large portion of our membership, we need to ensure we are extending these opportunities to them. The new application process for speakers is helping us continue to move the needle in this area. To achieve greater success with our efforts toward speaker diversity, however, we will need to receive many Open Call applications for 2024 from female and other diverse members.”

Opening October 1, 2022:
2024 Winter Conference & Annual Session Call for Speakers
Members interested in presenting a continuing education (CE) lecture at the 2024 Winter Conference (January 26-28 in San Antonio) and/or the 2024 Annual Session (May 3-7 in New Orleans) are invited to visit the AAO speakers’ application portal between October 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 to apply for consideration as a 2024 speaker.

Those interested in presenting on innovations, scientific advances, clinical techniques, practice management, inspiration and team-focused topics are encouraged to apply.

Learn More

* Members of the Committee on Conferences (CCON) include Drs. R. Bryn Cooper, Dale Anne Featheringham, Carlos Flores-Mir, Lili Horton, Anil Idiculla, Daniel Keith, Nellie Kim-Weroha, Neal Kravitz, Matt Larson, J. Martin Palomo, Jae Park, Sheldon Seidel and Peter Sinclair.