RETRACTED ARTICLE: Are There Gender Differences Among Leaders of Regional Orthopaedic Societies of the United States? Article Swipe

Retraction notice: On November 5, 2019, a reader emailed the Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® about possible data-collection errors in the study, “Are There Gender Differences Among Leaders of Regional Orthopaedic Societies of the United States?” (Published online ahead of print August 30, 2019. DOI: 10.1097/CORR.0000000000000956) [1]. After a thorough review from both the CORR® editorial team and the corresponding author of the manuscript, it was determined that the study contained inadvertent data-collection errors that would require fundamental modifications to all aspects of the paper—Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Figures, and Tables. After consulting the Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidance documents on such matters, the CORR editorial team does not believe that an erratum could adequately address the issues without a real risk that the content could be misunderstood. On November 12, after consulting with the corresponding author of the study, CORR’s Editor-in-Chief decided to retract this study. In the study, Gwam and colleagues [1] collected data (including gender, years of experience, and practice setting) on regional orthopaedic society members who held a position of leadership (four societies; n = 53) between 2012 and 2017. The authors compared the percentage of women in leadership with the percentage of women in practice in each of four geographic regions (Western Orthopaedic Association [WOA]; Southern Orthopaedic Association [SOA]; Eastern Orthopaedic Association [EOA]; Mid-America Orthopaedic Association [MAOA]) to see if the representation of women was proportional to that of men. Upon re-review of the data, in fact the authors did not review data from the same time periods for all of the involved societies as was originally stated. The authors inadvertently evaluated data from 2012-2017 for the MAOA and from 2014-2018 for the EOA, SOA, and WOA. Below are data by society for the period 2012-2018, which should have been the years considered for all societies, rather than 2012-2017 as was stated. For this retraction notice, in the interest of clarity, the authors re-reviewed the data for those four societies from the 2012-2013 through the 2017-2018 periods of board service. During this period, there were 373 Board of Directors positions across the four societies Between 2012-2018, two women (1.8%) were on the MAOA Board; the paper reported none. Regarding the WOA, after re-review of the data, the authors acknowledge errors in their data collection. There were women presidents in 2013 and 2014, and only one of them was included in the original data analysis. In addition, between 2012-2018, the WOA had three women board members, for a total of five women (12.2%) in leadership positions during that time; the paper reported only one. The SOA had one woman (3.5%) on the board during 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015; the paper erroneously reported none during the study period. The EOA had no women board members during the study period from 2012-2018. The authors apologize for these errors.