American Society of Clinical Oncology guidelines:
Directive: Demonstrate Respect for Colleagues
- All chairs, faculty, presenters, and panelists, including patients and advocates, who have a doctoral degree (e.g., MD, PhD, ScD, PharmD) should be introduced and addressed as Dr. Full Name or Dr. Last Name.
- All other chairs, faculty, presenters, and panelists (including patients and advocates) should be introduced and addressed as Mr./Ms. Full Name or Mr./Ms. Last Name.
- These forms of address should continue during Q&A and panel discussions, regardless of whether the faculty know one another. The key element is consistency of address among all panelists.
- We will ask all faculty to commit to use of a professional form of address when accepting their session invitations. Chairs will be asked to briefly reiterate this policy with all faculty in their session immediately prior to the start of the session.
The backstory is a 2019 Duma et al paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on
Evaluating Unconscious Bias: Speaker Introductions at an International Oncology Conference
"We conducted a retrospective, observational study of video-archived speaker introductions at the 2017 and 2018 ASCO Annual Meetings. A “professional address” was defined as the professional title followed by the speaker’s full name or last name. Multivariable logistic regressions were used to identify factors associated with the form of address.
Of 2,511 videos reviewed, 781 met inclusion criteria. Female speakers were addressed less often by their professional title compared with male speakers (62% v 81%; P , .001). Males were less likely to use a professional address when introducing female speakers compared with females when introducing male speakers (53% v 80%; P , .01). When women performed speaker introductions, no gender differences in professional address were observed (75% v 82%; P = .13). Female speakers were more likely to be introduced by first name only (17% v 3%; P , .001). Male introducers were more likely to address female speakers by first name only compared with female introducers (24% v 7%; P , .01). In a multivariable regression including gender, degree, academic rank, and geographic location of the speaker’s institution, male speakers were more likely to receive a professional address compared with female speakers (odds ratio, 2.43; 95% CI, 1.71 to 3.47; P , .01).
CONCLUSION: When introduced by men, female speakers were less likely to receive a professional address and more likely to be introduced by first name only compared with their male peers."
