FEATURE
A Leaking Pipeline Addressing gender inequities in medical leadership
third) of female full-time faculty. Historically, medicine has been a maledominated field. Increasingly, over the past decade, shifting perspectives on gender in the workplace has emerged. Perhaps on the wing of worldwide movements such as #TimesUp and #metoo, the spotlight on gender inequity is becoming ever more visible. November marked the historic win of Kamala Harris, who is the first Black, South-Asian female to become a vice-president elect in the US. But while the political glass ceiling has begun to shift, has medicine kept pace in addressing gender inequities?
Nathasha Dias Family Medicine Resident, University of Toronto
“Are you married?” That was the first thing Michelle Cohen heard on her first day of training with a surgeon. “As soon as I walked into the OR to introduce myself … it was an older doc and he turned and looked at me and his very first question was ‘Are you married?’ He continued to pester me on that,” says Cohen, a family physician from Brighton, Ontario, and faculty member in the Department of Family Medicine at Queen’s University. Gender discrimination is a frequently cited culprit for inequity in the workplace. Based on 2019 US data, approximately one in four female staff in the departments of anesthesiology, emergency medicine, orthopaedic surgery and general surgery reported experiencing disrespect based on their gender. Two of these departments (orthopaedics and general surgery) were also among the departments with the smallest proportion (less than one
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April 2021
Interest in pursuing academic medical leadership is often cultivated during medical training. Despite a continuing trend of more women than men enrolling in Canadian medical schools – 56 per cent of first-year medical students in 2017-18 were female – fewer women advance in their careers to hold academic leadership positions. During her training, Lesley Barron, a general surgeon who practiced at Georgetown Hospital in Halton, Ontario, says, “There were only two female surgeons, a vascular and a general surgeon, and another one joined in the time that I was doing my surgical training in Canada, and none of them were married or had children. They certainly weren’t supportive of female trainees in terms of acknowledging that there was a gender bias, or that it was harder for women trainees to get through training.” Much of the existing data on gender inequities in medical leadership stems from the US. In 2018, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) conducted a survey among 154 US medical schools and found that despite a progressive rise in the number of
