German Dental Congress 2022: 27 men, 9 women. Annual Conference of the German Society for Immunology 2022: 26 men, 14 women. Keynote Speaker at the German Cancer Congress 2022: 17 men, 2 women.

As in many industries, women are in the minority at medical congresses and conferences - at least in terms of their presence on stage. Yet they are represented in all medical professions with their expertise, in the meantime even in the majority. In order to strengthen the visibility of female doctors and women in the health sector, Speakerinnen.org, Prof. Dr. Mandy Mangler and the Round Table "Women in Health Care" are launching the campaign "Ärztinnen auf die Bühne!" (Female Doctors on Stage!) for International Women's Day 2023.

Capaign website "Ärztinnen auf die Bühne!" (in German language)

The alliance calls on all female experts in medicine and health care to register with their expertise at Speakerinnen.org. This will make it easier for event organisers and journalists to find female doctors, dentists and all other representatives of the medical professions and organisations. Speakerinnen.org is a free offer - for women as well as for event organisations. Shortly before 8 March 2023, a total of almost 4,000 women with diverse skills in numerous fields are registered at Speakerinnen.org.

Illustrations on Speakerinnen.org and here in the blog by Malwine

"Even in the health care sector, where the proportion of women in all professions is very high, congress organisers often state that they have not found a woman for the podium, workshops or training labs," says Mandy Schoßig of Speakerinnen.org, the platform for female experts, speakers, moderators and presenters. "We want to change that!"

"Studies show that gender-balanced staffing of leadership positions in medicine leads to more successful treatment," says Prof. Dr. Mandy Mangler, chief physician of the gynaecology clinic at the Auguste-Viktoria-Klinikum in Berlin. "The German Association of Women Doctors has analysed the proportion of women in clinical chairs at state universities - it is still only 13 per cent."

"More women in leadership positions on all medical boards broadens the view and can thus change rules towards a fairer health care or even a fairer society," adds Dr Christiane Groß, President of the German Medical Women’s Association (Deutscher Ärztinnenbund e.V.).

More visibility for women in the health sector.

The Round Table "Women in the Health Care System" is a cooperation partner for the campaign "Female Doctors on Stage!". It points out that the proportion of women in the health sector is constantly at 75 percent. Nevertheless, women are clearly underrepresented there in leadership positions as well as in their public visibility. Studies show that only about one-fifth of top management positions in hospitals are held by women, with a recent downward trend. This also applies to almost all areas of the health system, including associations of panel doctors (dentists), health insurance funds and health care companies.

"As representatives of a total of 13 women's networks and organisations in the healthcare sector, we are committed to ensuring that women not only play their part in the social context, but also have an equal say in determining and shaping it," emphasise Cornelia Wanke, Executive Director at Healthcare Frauen e.V. and Co-Chair of Spitzenfrauen Gesundheit e.V., as well as Dr Rebecca Otto, President of Dentista e.V. "Together, we are helping to make the many excellent women in the healthcare sector more visible and give them a platform."

About our cooperation partners

Prof. Dr. Mandy Mangler is chief physician at two gynaecology clinics at Vivantes. In the Tagesspiegel's gynaecology podcast "Gyncast" she discusses a wide range of women's health topics. In 2022, she was awarded the Berlin Women's Prize for her commitment to equality and diversity in medicine.

The Women in Health Round Table consists of a total of 13 women's networks and organisations. It is committed to the visibility of women in all areas of health care and in politics. Members of the Round Table are: Dentista e.V. - Association of Women Dentists, Deutscher Ärztinnenbund e.V., FidAR - Frauen in die Aufsichtsräte e.V., Healthcare Frauen e.V., Institut für Gender-Gesundheit e.V. , Pro Quote Medizin, #SheHealth - Women in digital Health, Spitzenfrauen Gesundheit e.V., Verband der ZahnÄrztinnen plus e.V.

It took almost a year and many volunteer hours of time, discussions, ideas and (mostly digital) meetings - but today the new speakerinnen.org page finally goes online. Designed by Salit Krac, the developers of the team have given the website a new, more contemporary look. The main new feature is the layout of the entire site, where women experts can register their competences free of charge.

We are especially pleased that new great illustrations by Malwine open the site. They show partly known, partly unknown women in different roles - as speaker, moderator, discussion partner - roles for which event organisations can find contact persons on Speakerinnen.org.

Our new illustrations of women speakers by Malwine

At the same time, our cooperation page of the Speakerinnen Vorarlberg is going online in the same look. Around 100 Vorarlberg women experts and speakers are already online here and can be found with their expertise and contacted for events, interviews and more.

www.vorarlberg.speakerinnen.org

After the relaunch is before many more tasks: Now that we have reached this milestone, there is still a lot to do! We are working intensively on improving the search function on Speakerinnen.org so that users can search for experts in an even more targeted way. And we are in contact for further cooperations, which we will tell you about soon!

More illustrations by Malwine

Since the International Women's Day 2020, Speakerinnen.org offers many new functionalities, categories and a new page design All this was developed by Salit Krac, a product and UX designer from Berlin. Her professional path led her from graphic design to product design and we talked to Salit about her thoughts on the new features on Speakerinnen.org and the path she took from idea generation to implementation.

Salit Krac

You "prescribed" important changes for Speakerinnen.org - what are the most important new features of the website?

The most important feature as I see it, which was also the main challenge in this project was designing the filter system which allows event organizers to find speakers with a more precise and user-friendly path.

A user which looks for a female professional speaker in a women-only database has some amount of awareness in mind, and we seek to reward this awareness by providing a platform where the speaker can be found in a quick and pleasant way.

UX means User Experience – that means, you always think from the user's point of view? What does that mean exactly?

An experience designer or a product designer is the person responsible to always make sure the design human centric. This might sound like an obvious thing, as these products are made by humans for humans to use, so how can we go wrong? But you will be surprised how much the user goals and needs get lost in the process of product creation.

Even if the engineering team is an empathetic team of individuals who always have the user in mind, their focus is and should be on the engineering. The product designer then has the role to take care of the user-facing elements of the product and test them on real users, gather feedback and use this data to iterate a better design.

And here is the difference between product design and web design or graphic design: a better design does not mean a prettier one, but a design that allows the user to navigate better which using the product.

How do you proceed when you develop new ideas for a website? What are your first thoughts?

The process of designing a product changes if the website or product is completely new and we are starting from scratch, or if it is already rolling in the market for some time and has a steady number of users. This would be the case of Speakerinnen.org - I joined the team when the database was already live and serving users, but the experience was not ideal. Taking it from this state - we decided to tackle first the conference/event organizer user group, and only later on, proceed to the speaker's user group.

The approach here was to first understand this user group and their experience when looking for a speaker for their conference. How do they approach this task, what are their pain points? This was made talking to people who have this role in their daily jobs, as well as sending out questionnaires to reach more users.

When approaching the design of Speakerinnen.org, I was taking into consideration the existing interface and features in order not to create extra workload for the engineers. After validating the design with the team and tweaking it according to their comments and remarks I moved to the testing stage. We invited a few users who were given a scenario and had to go through the website and execute tasks. After synthesizing these results I had a clear understanding of when did we do right and what can be improved, and went on to iterating the design accordingly.

In the end priorities and feasibility always dominate our discussion on which changes should be implemented right away and which will be referred to later.

And how do you proceed until the ideas are implemented?

Being a product designer (which contains also the user interface part, not only the UX) my next step is to take care of the user interface design (UI).

Which means?

…how do things look. Colors, shadows, fonts, visual elements. On the UX side, the next step would be to address the second user group – the speakers. The speakers who register to the website have a completely different journey and therefore the process begins anew.

How did you work together with the Speakerinnen-team?

The team was involved in every step of the design process and I made sure to always share my ideas and sketches from the research. What I like most about involving this team in particular in the process is that they always have their own suggestions and insights which are excellent and may have never crossed my mind. Compared to other teams I have worked with they have what we call a high level of “UX maturity”.

Which ideas did you have that have not been implemented yet? but maybe in the future?

The way I see it, subscribing as a speaker or finding a speaker on the Speakerinnen website should be es easy as online shopping in the most trendy, intuitive websites, and should include all the perks we know from the e-commerce world. So, I could imagine more features such as: a collection where to add my own favorites. Having some sort of recommendation system (we do not want to use rating but rather an alternative). And also simple features like seeing last online activity or showing how long does it usually takes one to respond would be nice.

There is a lot more work to be done in regard to increasing trust in the platform. Speakerinnen.org is for me (and us) a website that can be used reliably and trustworthily to address female conference speakers, moderators etc. Highlighting their competencies through the website is my real challenge.

--

Salit Krac is a product designer and does research on the usage behaviour of people. She works in Berlin.

The interview was conducted by Mandy Schoßig.