GENDER DIFFERENCES IN ACADEMIC MEDICAL SOCIETY FELLOWSHIPS

Abstract

SESSION TITLE: Cultural Diversity SESSION TYPE: Original Investigation Posters PRESENTED ON: 10/10/2018 01:00 pm - 02:00 pm PURPOSE: Medicine has historically been a field dominated by men, particularly for physicians. Women in medical professions face a number of unique obstacles, such as societal biases, stereotyping, and an unequal division of household labor that make the field of medicine unwelcoming to females. These challenges are barriers to academic advancement, and may contribute to the difficulties in academic advancement within medical societies. As the medical field workforce continues to equalize, analyzing current structures is a crucial step in identifying gaps in leadership opportunities. There is little data describing the relationship between gender and professional characteristics among Medical Society Fellows. Our goal is to describe the relationships between gender and academic advancement as defined by membership in a Medical Society Fellowship. METHODS: We compared shared data regarding demographics and certain professional characteristics of current CHEST Fellows, as well as the gender of the 2017 applicants to Fellow of the American College of CHEST Physicians (ACCP) and the gender of corresponding letter of recommendation authors. RESULTS: In 2017, 13% of the Fellows of the College of CHEST Physicians were women (n=1469 of 10,910). Within the cohort of CHEST Fellows, there were significant differences in gender by specialty; Pediatrics had the most women (23%), while there were significantly less women in Internal Medicine (14%), Allergy & Immunology (7%), Surgery (7%), Anesthesiology (5%), and Thoracic Surgery (4%). There were no differences in gender between United State and non-United States based fellows. In the cohort of applicants to Fellow in 2017, 20% were women. When examining the letters of recommendation, 75% of the sets of letters of recommendation were both from men, while only 3% were both from women, and 23% had one of each gender. Women applicants had at least one letter from another woman 38% of the time, while men had a letter from at least one women 21% of the time, although this was not statistically significant (OR 2.26; 95% CI 0.81-6.28). Male applicants had two letters from men 79% of the time, compared to 62% of women having both letters from men. CONCLUSIONS: The proportion of female Fellows within the CHEST organization (13%) is low and below the national average of women physicians (30%) and pulmonary & critical care physicians (18-33%). However, there is a higher proportion of women in the 2017 applicants to Fellow of ACCP. Both applicant genders were more likely to receive letters of recommendations from male physicians. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: This data can be used to bring more awareness to the struggles of finding mentors and sponsors for female physicians. It also highlights a possible opportunity to cultivate change by encouraging women to mentor other women in academic medicine. DISCLOSURES: No relevant relationships by Christopher Carroll, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Roozehra Khan, source=Web Response