Women in Academic Psychiatry

Abstract

Women in departments of psychiatry 2,781 37 Associate professors 450 29 Full professors 217 15 Dr. Bickel is a Career Development and Executive Coach and a Faculty Career and Diversity Consultant. Address correspondence to Dr. Bickel, 7407 Venice St., Falls Church, VA 22043; janetbickel@cox.net (E-mail). Copyright 2004 Academic Psychiatry. Women constituted 50% of applicants and new entrants to U.S. medical schools in 2003. As shown in Table 1, the proportion of total fulltime, female medical school faculty was 29% in 2002. This proportion (37%) was considerably higher in psychiatry (1). Currently, the proportion of female medical school instructors has risen to 46%. Overall, however, only 24% of associate professors and 13% of full professors are women. In psychiatry, these proportions are 29% and 15%, respectively. Women constitute only 15% of tenured medical school faculty nationally (all ranks). Table 2 displays faculty data from another angle— that is, looking at the proportion of males and females who are full professors. In 2002, 11% of all female faculty, compared with 31% of all male faculty, were full professors. It has taken more than 15 years for this proportion of women to grow from 10% to 11%. Table 2 also shows that these proportions were 8% and 26% inmedical school departments of psychiatry, revealing a lower than average percentage of both female and male faculty at the rank of full professor. The Association of American Medical College’s Faculty Roster System data also reveal that the average annual rate of female faculty attrition (9.1%) exceeds that of males (7%) (2). The gender gap in attrition is even greater for psychiatry faculty, with the attrition rate for women being 9.5% and the rate for men being 7.8% With regard to academic administrative roles women chaired approximately 214 departments in 2002 (91 basic science departments and 123 clinical departments, including interim/actingChairs),which is about 8% of all medical school Chairs (1), and eight women chaired a medical school psychiatry department (which equals 6% of Chairs if all 125 schools have a department). Currently, no female psychiatrist is dean of a U.S. medical school.