The Career Advising Program: A Strategy to Achieve Gender Equity in Academic Medicine

Excerpt

Significant gender disparities in academic rank exist at US medical schools, even after controlling for age, time since training, specialty, and measures of productivity, and despite increasing numbers of women entering medicine over the past 30 years. Within internal medicine nationally, only 19% of full professors are women.1 Moreover, only 12% of internal medicine department chairs are female, and women lead a minority of general internal medicine or hospitalist divisions.1, 2 Given that women now constitute half of US medical school graduates, identifying strategies to support their career development in order to capitalize on the untapped leadership potential of this large segment of our health care workforce is critical. Other industries have addressed similar gender gaps in part by creating formal sponsorship programming.3 Academic medicine could follow suit. Specialty societies like the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) are well-positioned to spearhead efforts to cultivate underutilized female talent by providing them the access to senior leaders and professional networks that is so important to advancement. We describe SGIM’s novel sponsorship initiative, the Career Advising Program, and how it might serve as a model for this type of endeavor. …