Our sheMD Editors-in-Chief not only run sheMD (and work as Emergency Medicine Physicians), but they also do gender-based research!

Their recent article "Sex Distribution of Editorial Board Members Among Emergency Medicine Journals" looks at the gender makeup of the head of Emergency Medicine Journals!

WHAT DID WE FIND?
We found a disparity among emergency medicine journals’ editors in chief and editorial board members. To read more click HERE.

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WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? 
We believe including women on editorial boards may help narrow the publication gender gap in medicine, and we are so excited to see women in training (residents/fellows) getting involved on editorial boards!

We want to encourage you to get involved!
Even if you don't feel ready- put your name out there!
Get involved in the peer review process!
Help narrow the publication gap!

This 2017 study showed that women introduced by men at Internal Medicine Grand Found were less likely to be addressed by professional title than were men introduced by men.

Female introducers were more likely to use professional titles when introducing any speaker during the first form of address compared with male introducers.
In mixed-gender dyads, where the introducer was female and speaker male, formal titles were used 95.0% (57/60) of the time.
In mixed-gender dyads, when the introducer was male and the speaker female, formal titles were used 49.2% (31/63) of the time.

Differential formality in speaker introductions may amplify isolation, marginalization, and professional discomfiture expressed by women faculty in academic medicine.

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We earned our titles. Let's use them! 
 

The Underrepresentation of Women Physicians Among Recognition Award Recipients From Medical Specialty Societies.

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This article looks at the underrepresentation of female physicians compared with their presence in the specific field across a variety of fields. In other words, they compared the percent of women receiving awards to the percent of women practicing in that specific specialty. They included dermatology, neurology, orthapedics, otolaryngology, PM&R, neurosurgery, plastic surgery, physiatry and anesthesiology in the study.

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Wondering what they found? Click here.

The authors of this study look at the time spent on work and domestic duties for male and female primary care physicians with children at home to see if there were differences.   They found that men were more likely to have a spouse that was employed part-time or not at all, whereas women were more likely to have a spouse that was employed full-time.  They also found that women with children spent significantly more time performing domestic duties each week. 

 Wondering how many hours each week?

Click here.

Let's talk about looking like a woman!

 
An article was published in 2016, titled "But You Don’t Look Like A Scientist!: Women Scientists with Feminine Appearance are Deemed Less Likely to be Scientists." Many of us already inherently know this to be true from our experiences. In medicine, young female physicians are assumed to be nurses. Why is that? 

To see our thoughts, click here.

The article from the Harvard Business Review, titled, What's Holding Women in Medicine Back from Leadership, looks at  gender disparities in positions of leadership in medicine.  For example, "women account for only 18% of hospital CEOs and 16% of all deans and department chairs in the U.S."          

To see our thoughts, click here.                        

Finding mentors can be hard! I love the suggestion of created a BOARD OF DIRECTORS or MASTERMIND GROUP shared by Harvard Business Review in their article titled, Your Career Needs Many Mentors, Not Just One.

To see our thoughts, click here.

Our sheMD Editors-in-Chief not only run sheMD (and work as Emergency Medicine Physicians), but they also do gender-based research!

Many specialties have been shown to have gender bias affecting medical society awards.  See our journal club. In our study, titled  "What Emergency Medicine Rewards: Is There Implicit Gender Bias in National Awards?" we looked at the gender distribution of Emergency Medicine awards.

WHAT DID WE FIND?
Females received 28% of awards in Emergency Medicine from 2014 to 2018, which is proportional to the percentage of women in Emergency Medicine (27%). 

There were some other gendered differences, click here to read more. 


What can we do keep closing the gap?
Nominate each other for awards!
Ask others to nominate you!

Physicians who are mothers face challenges with equal distribution of domestic duties, which can be an obstacle in career advancement and achieving overall job satisfaction.

Overall, this 2019 study looked at over 1700 female physicians. Physician mothers report having more domestic responsibilities than their partners.

To read more, click here.

This study looked at medical students self-assessment during their surgery clerkship and then looked at the faculty evaluation of the students.  They found that female students significantly underestimated their midclerkship performance compared with male students on a surgery rotation. They also found that the male students over-estimated their performance, however this did not reach significance.

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Wanting to know more about how their self-evals compared to faculty evaluations? 

Click here.

Want to learn more about mentorship, coaching, and sponsorship? We recommend this fantastic article by Vineet Chopra, MD, Vineet M. Arora, MD,and Sanjay Saint, MD entitled "Will you be my mentor?- Four Archetypes to Help Mentees Succeed in Academic Medicine?" 

The authors discuss the 4 types of supporters you can (and should have) to help advance your career! 

To see our thoughts, click here.

This article discusses the idea of pregnancy discrimination, or pregnancy resulting in women getting "knocked off the professional ladder."  This article is NOT specific to medicine.  The authors argue that pregnancy discrimination remains widespread in businesses across our country, and can start as soon as a woman is showing and last through her early years as a mother.

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Wanting more data on pregnancy discrimination and the maternal wall? 

Click here.

There was a recent article that was published on female physicians and the management of heart attacks in women. This research has been all over the news and social media recently, and I think its worth a discussion. Headlines are stating, "Women more likely to survive if treated by female doctors"and "Women more likely to survive heart attack if ER physician is female."

To see our thoughts, click here. 

This article, published in JAMA,  looks at the use of social media as virtual communities in which female physicians can share in struggles, provide additional coping mechanisms and bring light to the unique issues that they face as #womeninmedicine. 

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To see our thoughts, click here.