A U.K. conference on breast cancer is receiving criticism after a post on social media revealed an all-male panel.
A photo from the London Breast Meeting (LBM), which took place in September, was posted to LinkedIn and showed a 14-member panel of men.
Andrew Kelso, the chief medical officer of a hospital in Harlow, England, wrote in the post about having done some deep thinking on the lack of women in surgery during induction, when the photo of the all-male panel soon dropped in his inbox.
“This picture featuring a solid row of men sets out the outcome of the leaky pipeline better than any words can,” he wrote.
Several in the comments described the photo as “shocking,” while others thought it was a joke.
“Seriously? This is like a meme…’The all-men London breast experts,’ wrote Joo-Young Chun, a consultant interventional radiologist at St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “Absolutely ridiculous.”
“(Fourteen) men on stage talking about breasts – my irony-meter has exploded again,” wrote David Schley, a charity leader. “I assumed it was a spoof.”
In a post that shared the photo on X, breast surgeon Rhea Liang used the hashtag #nomoremanels, with the term “manel” referring to all-male panels.
“The picture is particularly striking because it’s so clearly about a ‘women’s’ issue, but manels anywhere are problematic because it’s such a visible sign of the underlying exclusionary culture,” she wrote in one of her replies to the post.
Some of the conference organizers defended the panel. LMB scientific chair Marlene See and conference chair Jian Farhadi told The BMJ, a medical media outlet, the photo “did not include the scientific chair, who was standing to the right of the podium, or the female faculty who had not yet arrived.”
They added that six of the 47 faculty at the conference were women – 12.8 per cent. However, they committed to doing better at future events.
“We strongly believe that the gender disparity needs to be addressed and we will continue to aim for a higher proportion of female speakers in 2027 and beyond,” they told the outlet.
