The AAMC's Increasing Women's Leadership Project Implementation Committee examined four years of data on the advancement of women in academic medicine. With women comprising only 14% of tenured faculty and 12% of full professors, the committee concludes that the progress achieved is inadequate.
Because academic medicine needs all the leaders it can develop to address accelerating institutional and societal needs, the waste of most women's potential is of growing importance. Only institutions able to recruit and retain women will be likely to maintain the best housestaff and faculty. The long-term success of academic health centers is thus inextricably linked to the development of women leaders.
The committee therefore recommends that medical schools, teaching hospitals, and academic societies (1) emphasize faculty diversity in departmental reviews, evaluating department chairs on their development of women faculty; (2) target women's professional development needs within the context of helping all faculty maximize their faculty appointments, including helping men become more effective mentors of women; (3) assess which institutional practices tend to favor men's over women's professional development, such as defining academic success as largely an independent act and rewarding unrestricted availability to work (i.e., neglect of personal life); (4) enhance the effectiveness of search committees to attract women candidates, including assessment of group process and of how candidates' qualifications are defined and evaluated; and (5) financially support institutional Women in Medicine programs and the AAMC Women Liaison Officer and regularly monitor the representation of women at senior ranks.
In 1996, the AAMC approved the report of its Increasing Women's Leadership in Academic Medicine Project Committee.1 President Jordan J. Cohen charged the Increasing Women's Leadership Project Implementation Committee with prioritizing the 15 recommendations (Appendix A) and working to advance them.
At the outset this committee recognized that (1) The number of women entering medical school has led to the premature conclusion that gender equity has been achieved; (2) drawing a circle around difficulties specific to women's advancement is impossible because men and women's professional development goals and needs are more alike than different; (3) few medical schools treat faculty as human resources to be retained and developed, thus a framework is often lacking for improving faculty professional development in general; and (4) the paucity of research on leadership development and executive selection in academic medicine means that a framework is also lacking for understanding how best to improve women's leadership development.
But these complexities need not deter medical schools, teaching hospitals, and academic societies from further work to increase the number of women leaders. The 1996 report presented the rationale as (1) principles (the right thing to do); (2) pragmatic (the smart thing to do); and (3) prevention (of litigation and the loss of women's talents). The project implementation committee finds the second of these to be the most persuasive: an effective business strategy includes the development of women leaders as central to the long-term financial success of the medical center.