It is well documented that women are under-represented in surgical specialities, both as trainees and consultants. Data published in Europe and the United States (US) consistently reports that women constitute between 10 and 20 % of the orthopaedic workforce [1,2]. Irish figures are similar, with The Health Service Executive's Medical Workforce Report for 2022 to 2023 highlighting that women represent only 10 % of the consultant workforce in Trauma and Orthopaedics (T&O) [3]. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland's (RCSI) Progress Report on Promoting Gender Equality in Surgery published in 2017 shows similar figures for Higher Specialist Trainees in T&O with just 6 trainees being female at the time of reporting, equating to 12.24 % of all T&O trainees in Ireland at that time [4].

The importance of diversity in the workplace should be emphasised, and it is apparent from experiences within business and commercial industries that having a diverse workforce has many benefits. These include improved problem-solving ability, increased innovation and creativity, and greater employee engagement and retention [5]. In the private business sector earnings have been shown to increase by up to 14 % when teams are diverse [6]. In the healthcare context the value of diversity is less well defined. The available evidence, however, does show that healthcare workforce diversity improves problem solving ability, increases staff retention, promotes professional and academic collaborations and ultimately improves patient outcomes [7,8]. It is reasonable to conceive that more diversity within orthopaedic teams would reap similar rewards.

The critical threshold for realising the results that diversity brings is widely reported as 30 %, that is, having at least 30 % minority representation at senior level [2,9,10]. Anecdotally, orthopaedics in Ireland is a male dominated speciality and female representation is quoted to be in the region of 10 %, however there is a paucity of literature examining gender breakdown, particularly at trainee level. Through retrospectively reviewing presentation programmes from the Irish Orthopaedic Association (IOA) annual conference, we will explore gender diversity within Irish academic orthopaedics over a sixteen-year period. We aim to provide insight into female representation in Irish orthopaedics over this time through evaluation of the main academic orthopaedic meeting. Specifically, we will review senior and non-consultant hospital doctor (NCHD)/trainee level representation; and analyse the trends over recent years to determine if we are moving towards the critical 30 %.