By Kate Rosenbluth

This article is an excerpt from a blog post originally published on biodesignalumni.com

Why do women rarely headline medtech conferences?

Amy Belt, Director, Covidien Ventures, pondered this question in the spring of 2009, looking out to a sea of navy blue blazers and calculating only 4% of the podium speakers at her 3 > previous conferences were women.

Belt was bothered that "it gave a visual that the experts were not woman. That simply wasn’t true." She decided to do something about it.

Click here to read the full blog post from Stanford Biodesign’s Alumni Blog

About the Author: Kate Rosenbluth, PhD is the 2012-2013 CTSA Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellow. She holds a PhD in bioengineering from UCSF and UC Berkeley, with a focus on neuro-imaging and medical device design.