They’re less likely to hold a higher-level professorship position, feature as a senior author on a paper, or receive a federal grant. Two recent studies underscore progress for and barriers to career advancement.
Dr. Nicola Dalbeth
One cross-sectional analysis of practicing U.S. rheumatologists found that fewer women are professors compared with men (12.6% vs. 36.8%) or associate professors (17.5% vs. 28%). A larger proportion of women serve as assistant professors (55.5% vs. 31.5%). From a leadership perspective, women are making progress. Their odds are similar to men as far as holding a fellowship or division director position in a rheumatology division.
For this study, published in Arthritis & Rheumatology on Aug. 16, April Jorge, MD, and her colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, identified 6,125 rheumatologists from a database of all licensed physicians and used multivariate logistic regression to assess gender differences in academic advancement. They arrived at their results after accounting for variables such as age, research and academic appointments, publications, achievements, and years since residency graduation.
Women rheumatologists are younger, completing their residency more recently than their male colleagues. Their numbers in academic rheumatology have gradually increased over the last few decades, recently outpacing men. In 2015, the American College of Rheumatology reported that women made up 41% of the workforce and 66% of rheumatology fellows. Dr. Jorge and associates stressed the importance of fostering women in leadership positions and ensuring gender equity in academic career advancement.
Women also had fewer publications and grants from the National Institutes of Health. Several factors could account for this, such as time spent in the workforce or on parental leave, work-life balance, and mentorship. “However, gender differences in academic promotion remained after adjusting for each of these typical promotion criteria, indicating that other unidentified factors also contribute to the gap in promotion for women academic rheumatologists,” the investigators noted.
The authors weren’t able to assess how parental leave and work effort affected results or why pay differences existed between men and women. They also weren’t able to determine how many physicians left academic practice. “If greater numbers of women than men left the academic rheumatology workforce – for one of many reasons, including that they were not promoted – our findings could underestimate sex differences in academic rank,” they acknowledged.
Lower authorship rate examined
Fewer women in full or associate professor positions might explain why female authorship on research papers is underrepresented, according to another study published Aug. 18 in Arthritis & Rheumatology. Ekta Bagga and colleagues at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) examined 7,651 original research articles from high-impact rheumatology and general medical journals published during 2015-2019 and reported that women were much less likely to achieve first or senior author positions in reports of randomized, controlled trials. This was especially true for studies initiated and funded by industry, compared with other research designs.