Overcoming gender obstacles in medicine

A lack of women in leadership positions, a gender pay gap, stereotypes and self-confidence all play a role in gender inequality in medicine. At the inaugural Women in Medicine Symposium, Vineet Arora, MD, detailed these issues and discussed how women could be more empowered in the medical field. Dr. Arora has spent most of her career in academic medicine and is currently assistant dean for Scholarship and Discovery at the University of Chicago. Because there is good data, she said, academic medicine is a great lens to track women in medicine. The data and results of many studies prove there are specific obstacles that women face, and now the focus needs to be on finding the solutions.The gender gap A study from 2016 looked at data through the Freedom of Information Act from state institutions controlling for factors like age, years of experience, specialty, scientific authorship, number of Medicare patients and more. The absolute difference between salaries of men and women was $50,000, and after the controls were taken into account it was still $18,000.“When I went to medical school in 1998, at Washington University in St. Louis, I was part of a medical class that for the first time had more women than men,” Dr. Arora said. The number of women entering medical school is increasing. Looking at data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, 46 percent of applicants to medical school and 47 percent of matriculates are women, one in five full professors are women...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news