Roll Up Your Sleeves, We Still Have Work To Do
Author: Avital O’Glasser, MD
Keywords: gender equity, CV, curriculum vitae, professional development, academic promotion, promotion, work life balance, mommy tax
Through the diligent work of the Women in Medicine Summit (WIMS) along with other #sheforshe and #heforshe allies, you should be aware of the many forms that gender inequity takes within the practice of medicine, medical training, academia, and professional development.
Knowledge is empowering, and I wanted to make sure you were aware of these recent publications. These articles definitely caught my attention. Think of this blog post as a mini-#womeninmedicine summer journal club!
Scholarly Productivity and Rank in Academic Hospital Medicine (Journal of Hospital Medicine)--this study looked at academic productivity overall within the still relatively young field of hospital medicine (ex. Only 2.7% had reached full professor). The authors found that academic promotion remained uncommon in hospital medicine, which seemed in part due to low scholarly productivity. Notably, the authors observed a statistically significant difference in publication rates for men versus women hospitalists--54% of men had published at least one manuscript compared to 43% of women.
The Impact of Gender on Researchers’ Assessment: A Randomized Controlled Trial (Journal of Clinical Epidemiology)--this study rated post-doctoral CVs on a scale of 0 to 10 for scientific contributions, leadership potential, teamwork abilities, and international experience. CVs from men consistently received higher scores in all categories compared to CVs from women, regardless of their career stage. For example, CVs from men were nearly 75% more likely to be rated high for leadership potential compared to women, even if the CVs were identical except for gender identification! The authors also observed that men and women evaluations both scored women’s CVs lower.
Gender Disparity in Citations in High-Impact Journal Articles (JAMA)-- citations are the currency of academic medicine. It’s not enough to publish, but you also have to be CITED (even though the number of citations is a poor surrogate marker for the true impact and legacy of someone’s work). The authors of this study examined over 5500 articles published in high-impact journals. Articles with women as primary authors had fewer citations compared to articles with men as primary authors (36 v 54 citations); similar results were seen comparing women v men as senior authors (37 v 51 citations). Looking deeper, they also found that articles with women primary AND senior authors had about 50% of the citations as articles with men in the primary and senior author positions (33 v 59 citations). As the authors state, “when women are successful in their research, they receive less recognition for it”, which they find concerning amidst the overall trends in gender disparities in academic achievements.
Why are these articles so important to examine? We women can’t research and publish as much. When we publish, we don’t get cited. When we accomplish something scholarly and put it on our CV, it doesn’t get rated as highly. Women are also less likely to be promoted and achieve leadership positions in medicine. Taken together, these articles add to our understanding of the invisibility and discrimnation of women in medicine. These challenges need allyship and deliberate, intentional efforts to highlight, address, and overcome. It will likely involve creative innovations, like our proposed CV-modifications to tackle pandemic-related gender inequity. And, it will involve deliberate efforts like those of WIMS to recognize and honor women in medicine.
About the Author: Avital O’Glasser, MD, is a hospitalist at Oregon Health & Science University and the editor of the WIMS blog (Twitter: @aoglasser).
