Capitalizing on Women's Intellectual Capital in the Professions

Women and minorities now make up almost 80% of the labor force. Yet women in the professions, including those in academic medicine, live in a half-changed world. Women make up more than half of college students and almost half of the students in most professions. And there have been large numbers of women in the faculty pipeline in higher education and academic medicine for over two decades now-plenty of time for them to emerge from the other end as major players and leaders. But research on women's careers demonstrates that increasing the number of women entering the pipeline is not translating into substantially increased numbers of women professors. The American Council on Education reports that only 13% of doctorate-granting institutions are headed by women, and the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that only 8% of medical school department chairs are women. Thus, while women have achieved equal access to higher education and other professions, we as a society are still wasting a great deal of their potential. How can we better capitalize on women's intellectual capital.Cited Here...

Fig. Page Morahan, P...

Fig. Janet Bickel, M...

REDEFINING THE IDEAL WORKER

Most organizational approaches to improving the advancement of women have attempted to fix or equip women with skills that they are perceived to lack and to revise a few policies. While these efforts are necessary, organizational development experts such as Debra Meyerson have concluded that such narrow approaches can have only limited success. ¹

Current research points to the need to ask fundamental questions about organizational culture, which boil down to asking what's wrong with our systems that women have such a hard time succeeding in them? This line of inquiry requires the willingness to step to the balcony and ask whether our current view of the ideal worker makes sense for the 21st century. The answer is No; that ideal evolved during the 19th century when men workers were supported by women at home and a short life span was common; that ideal completely excludes the predictable realities of child-bearing and childrearing. ²

Current expectations for career development remain rooted in the outdated assumption that ideal workers should devote themselves wholly to their work and never need extended time away from work for any purpose, especially during their twenties and thirties. This approach is increasingly out of touch with today's reality. Unlike previous generations, professionals are increasingly likely to be women. Thus, in many cases, mothers and many more workers, both women and men, in Generations X and Y are seeking work situations that allow for a high-quality personal life outside work without decades of deferred gratification.

Such current needs and expectations affect all the professions, including academic medical centers, and are among the forces inhibiting centers' ability to win the talent war that is essential for institutional success in this age that prizes intellectual capital so highly. These forces include being hit by the declining applicant pool to medical schools, difficulties in attracting and retaining the highest quality of faculty, and the impending retirement of the baby boom generation, which will markedly reduce the numbers of available qualified scientific professionals.

NEW APPROACHES TO IMPROVE RETURN ON INVESTMENT IN WOMEN

The high-tech, consulting, and scientific industries are outpacing academic medicine in revising the work culture to facilitate the retention and development of women. Here are a number of examples of interest:

* Identifying and altering cultural norms that have created work practices that disadvantage women. Many relational strengths and behaviors more common in women than men (e.g., team support) are relied upon as a free resource, simultaneously being required and devalued. ³ To move beyond this norm, organizations can identify relational skills in terms of competence and value added. For example, GlaxoSmithKline, British Petroleum, and Siemens explicitly reward and promote managers according to how effectively they and their staff share knowledge with others outside their units. Numerous firms employ multirater assessments of emotional intelligence and relational competencies to identify and help leaders develop needed skills. Consider Irwin Rubin's observation: Staff infections in the culture of a healthcare organization are as potentially lethal as Staph infections in the culture of a treatment room. ⁴ Academic medical centers could assign monetary equivalents and redefine outcomes to include those outcomes embedded in other people (e.g. advising others, providing information, effective teamwork, mentoring leading to grant or manuscript submission).

* Changing the norm of independence. Industry has developed clear methods to reward interdisciplinary team efforts. In academic medicine, the culture of the independent investigator still creates disincentives to participate in interdisciplinary efforts unless one is principal investigator. Yet, many of society's most pressing problems require investigation by interdisciplinary teams in the real-life swamp. A related cultural norm worthy of reconsideration is rewarding rugged individualists and heroes who handle crises instead of changing work practices to reduce the need for managing by crisis.

* Challenging the norm that work is the public sphere and completely separate from the private family sphere. Deloitte and Touche changed the norm for out-of-town consultation assignments from five or six days away from home each week to four days, with the fifth day flexible for whatever the consultant needs. Academic medical centers can also question and change historical work practices. In the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University for almost 100 years, Osler Medical Grand Rounds was held at 8 AM on Saturday morning. Once women surfaced and questioned how this norm disproportionately disadvantaged them, this practice was revised, and the commitment and satisfaction of men as well as women increased as a result.

* Recognizing and rewarding leaders for workforce diversity and talent management. Numerous organizations link administrators' compensation to the achievement of diversity goals, including the retention and advancement of women. They measure and compensate leaders for their effectiveness in succession planning, mentoring, and achieving career flexibility with their staff. Catalyst produces an annual publication that tracks women in leadership positions and corporate boards of Fortune 1000 companies and gives national awards for best practices (www.catalystwomen.org). The AAMC's annual reporting of school-identified statistics on women faculty and administrators is an important step forward in this area (http://www.aamc.org/about/progemph/wommed/stats00/start.htm). Another step forward would be for schools to conduct cost-benefit studies of the development of talent versus the constant recruitment and replacement of faculty and staff.

* Valuing qualitative research and soft science similarly to quantitative hard science. Academic medicine has made only minor inroads in translating these and related everyday activities into teaching, applied, and integrative scholarship, even though this approach was encouraged by Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, published over ten years ago. The continuing and almost exclusive focus on randomized control studies means few grants and few places to publish qualitative research, even though this may be the optimal approach to study many complex societal problems.

WAYS TO PROCEED

Scientific and organizational models to identify and solve problems have obvious application here. The critical point is to identify the absence of significant numbers of women in leadership as a problem. Then develop hypotheses about causes, collect and analyze data, design solutions, and test them. This work requires a long-term focus, and substantial progress can be made in the next ten years. For instance, the national Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) program has incorporated several of the newer organizational approaches in carrying out its mission to increase the number and success of women in senior leadership positions (www.mcphu.edu/elam ⁵). Likewise, the National Science Foundation, convinced that only institutional transformations will remove barriers to women scientists' advancement, has initiated a new grant program to encourage institution-level policy changes, e.g., reconfiguring the tenure track to better match women's life and career needs.

There are many long-term payoffs for academic health centers that capitalize on women's intellectual capital. For instance, multiple ways of viewing and solving all the complex problems medicine faces can be more fully realized with the addition of women in the decision-making process. As Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has said, Women… bring different perspectives than men do to public policy issues… I don't think it's a coincidence that federal funding for women's health care research went up once more women were elected to the House and Senate. We ensure that concerns that affect women disproportionately are brought to the table. Business has increasingly recognized that diversity in leadership styles and skills adds value to customers and that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones. What can academic medicine learn from these examples of capitalizing on women's intellectual capital?