Gender Representation in Major Orthopaedic Surgery Meetings: A Quantitative Analysis.

Background: Orthopaedic surgery suffers from gender disparity, and annual conferences are visible opportunities to quantify gender representation within a field. Therefore, the purpose of this manuscript was to investigate the prevalence of female speakers and moderators, and male-only panel sessions, at 10 major Orthopaedic Surgery meetings. Methods: Conference programs and details of faculty moderating or presenting in 10 Orthopaedic Surgery annual meetings in 2021 were retrieved. Conferences were selected with the aim of size and diversity in subspecialty topics and included American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons, American Association for Hand Surgery, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, Canadian Orthopaedic Association (COA), European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, North American Spine Society, Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS), Orthopaedic Trauma Association, and Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America (POSNA). Primary outcomes included percentage of female chairs and speakers and percentage of male-only panels, while secondary outcomes included number of publications, number of citations, and H-indexes of faculty. Further subgroup comparisons were performed between male-only panels and non-male-only panels and female members and male members. Results: Of 207 included sessions, 121 (58.5%) were male-only panels and 150 (12.6%) of 1,188 faculty members were women. Conferences organized by the COA, ORS, and POSNA had higher percentages of female representation, while spine surgery and adult hip/knee reconstruction sessions had more than 70% male-only panels and fewer than 10% female members. There were no significant differences between male members and female members regarding years of practice; however, male members were more likely to hold the title of professor (p < 0.001). Male members and female members stratified by quartiles of publications, citations, and H-indexes, moderated or participated in similar numbers of sessions, indicating an absence of selection bias. Conclusions: There is a high prevalence of male-only panels (58.5%) and an overall lack of female representation (12.6%) in 10 major Orthopaedic Surgery meetings. Male members and female members from these conferences were found to have similar qualifications academically. Specific strategies such as the elimination of male-only panels, selecting diverse conference organizers, and forming conference equity, diversity, and inclusion committees can help achieve cultural change. Level of Evidence: Level V.

Translating Dark into Bright: Diary of a Post-Critical Year.

This is an account of a reading project that began in February 2020. Australia was burning, a pandemic was simmering, the two of us were early in our PhD journeys at the Melbourne Law School. Already, we felt exhausted by critical theory which seemed to amplify the affects we felt all too intensely. Our reading project began as an attempt to find and inhabit texts that might move beyond critique, that might allow us to find wonder and vitality in legal theory. Taking up the literary critic Rita Felski's invitation to craft a post-critical reading practice, our reading list evolved iteratively to encompass themes and concerns that we identified as possibly correlating with said practice. It evolved too, in conversation with Melbourne, as the city journeyed through different stages of the pandemic. Constantly changing restrictions changed the ways in which we met and conversed, influencing in turn the texts we chose to read and the manner in which we read them. In this account, we pay attention to the time and place of our encounters with these interlocutors, and to the feelings these encounters generated. As such, this article takes the form of a series of (revised) diary entries: first written in 2020, then revisited in the corresponding months of 2021. What we hope emerges from these entries is a sense of how these theoretical texts train us to live in a world undergoing a compounding series of crises - and, perhaps, to imagine that world otherwise. In a more jurisprudential register, we hope that our experiment will identify the methods these texts might give us for (re-)engaging with law in a spirit of wonder and vitality.

Fit-to-Targets and Aided Speech Intelligibility Index Values for Hearing Aids Fitted to the DSL v5-Adult Prescription.

BACKGROUND: Matching hearing aid output levels to prescribed targets is a component of preferred practice, yet recent normative data on appropriateness of fittings are lacking. Verification measures that assess closeness of fit-to-target include raw deviations from target, root-mean-squared-error (RMSE) deviations from target, and aided Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) values. Establishing normative ranges for these measures may help hearing professionals determine whether a patient's fit-to-targets and/or aided speech audibility is typical for his or her degree of hearing loss. PURPOSE: This article aims to characterize the range of fit-to-target and the range of aided SII associated with hearing aid fittings using the Desired Sensation Level version 5.0 (DSL v5-adult) prescription with adults, considering also hearing aid style, venting, and audiometric characteristics. RESEARCH DESIGN: A descriptive and correlational study of data collected from a retrospective chart review. RESULTS: Hearing aid fittings to 281 ears were compiled. The four-frequency average deviation from target (RMSE) was within ± 5 dB of target in 77% of fittings for mid-level speech. Deviation from targets increased with hearing loss, particularly when the loss is greater than 85 dB hearing level or if the loss was steeply sloping. Venting increased the deviation from targets in the low frequencies. Aided SII values strongly correlated with the participants' hearing thresholds. Clinical ranges for RMSE and aided SII were developed for characterization of fitting outcomes. CONCLUSION: Fitting to DSL v5-adult targets was observed within ± 5 dB absolute deviation, or within 5 dB RMSE, on average for typical adult hearing aid fittings. Confidence intervals for deviation from target and aided SII are proposed.