Gender
representation and equality in medicine has been an important area of
student discussion in recent years. Women are less likely than men to be chosen as speakers during grand
rounds, the academic mainstay of expert-delivered lectures used to share
patient-care guidelines and cutting-edge research within clinical
departments.
The findings by researchers at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Medicine were published today in
JAMA Internal Medicine.
‘Women are less likely than men to be chosen as speakers during grand rounds.’
Despite women comprising 47% of medical students, 46%
of residents and 36% of faculty nationwide, only 26% of
grand rounds speakers were women. Across clinical specialties, grand
rounds speakers were 44% less likely than medical students, 39% less likely than residents, and 21% less likely than
faculty to be women. Additionally, speakers invited from outside
institutions were less likely to be women than those invited to speak at
grand rounds from among an institution's own personnel.
"The people at the podiums do not resemble the people in the
audience," said Julie Boiko, who led the study while a
medical student at the Pitt School of Medicine. "This is the first time we have data
to support that there may be a gender bias in speaker selection at
academic grand rounds."
Data for the
JAMA research letter was collected from nine major
clinical specialties and 79 medical schools and academic hospitals. In
total, researchers analyzed more than 200 grand rounds websites and
calendar listings for speaker series, as well as more than 7,000
individual sessions for speaker gender and institutional affiliations.
As follow up to this study, researchers plan to identify specific
factors associated with having greater gender balance on grand rounds
speaker rosters.
"We were surprised by the consistency of this underrepresentation
across most specialties and the discovery that speakers invited from
outside a given institution are less likely to be women than speakers
invited from within the institution," said Alyce Anderson, coauthor of
the study and an M.D./Ph.D. candidate at the Pitt School of Medicine.
"With this data, speaker planning committees, departments and
institutions can strive for gender representation that approximates that
of individual clinical specialties' faculty and/or trainees. Such
efforts may have a positive effect on retaining women in the academic
medical workforce."
Source: Eurekalert
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