When discussing why women advance slower than their male counterparts in medicine and academics, two seemingly rational explanations tend to dominate.
It's a pipeline issue: A dearth of women in the lower tiers of the profession clearly limit the number of women qualified for leadership positions, and thus the imbalance is created.
It's a family issue: When women take time off to have and raise children, they fall behind on their career tracks and struggle to catch up.
While both of those explanations may appear valid, under closer scrutiny, neither hold water.
According to the 2006 National Academies' report "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering," for more than 30 years, women have made up over 30 percent of the doctorates of the behavioral sciences and 20 percent of the life sciences, yet less than 16 percent of the full professors in social and behavioral sciences are women. About 15 percent of life sciences professorships are held by women. Minority women, meanwhile, were cited as "virtually absent from the nation's leading science and engineering departments."
"We have plenty of women in medicine," said Dr. Rache Simmons, the Anne and Edwin Weiskopf Professor of Surgical Oncology at Weill Cornell Medical College. "That's not the problem. Forty percent of the faculty here are women. The problem is under-representation in leadership positions and high academic ranks. It is not a pipeline issue. Women are not selected for a variety of reasons and that's what we need to try to correct."
Weill Cornell Medical College has taken an active role in the correction. In 2009, it established the Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science, which, through recruitment, mentoring, promotion and retention, seeks to cultivate and sustain a diverse faculty. The office is led by Dr. Debra Leonard, chief diversity officer. Dr. Leonard is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, vice chair for laboratory medicine, and director of the clinical laboratories in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Simmons serves as director of gender diversity; Dr. Carla Boutin-Foster serves as the Office's director of cultural diversity. Dr. Foster is the Nanette Laitman Clinical Scholar in Public Health/Community Health and associate professor of medicine and associate professor of integrative medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Recently, the Office sponsored a series of workshops on success strategies and negotiating techniques for medical students, postdocs, fellows and junior faculty. The Department of Human Resources, the Department of Surgery Grand Rounds, and the Office of the Dean co-sponsored the workshops.
"Women don't feel as comfortable negotiating for salary, lab space, academic support, academic rank, advancement, clinical space, everything," said Dr. Simmons. "We want to help with that because our entire professional lives are about negotiating."
The day of workshops, held Oct. 18, began with a lecture by Dr. Virginia Valian, distinguished professor of psychology and linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City of New York, and author of "Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women in Medicine."
According to Dr. Valian, the lack of progress can be traced much further back to before a woman begins her career in science or starts considering a family.
"What is responsible for women's lack of progress in the professions and in academia is the gender schemas through which we all — male and female alike — perceive and evaluate women," Dr. Valian said. "The small but systematic undervaluation of women culminates in women's smaller salaries compared to men and slower rates of promotion."
These evaluations occur, Dr. Valian continued, on an almost unconscious level, but until we realize and evaluate them, progress will be difficult, if not impossible.
"Society has these ingrained opinions about men and women that are impossible not to have unless you were brought up in the vacuum," Dr. Simmons said. "The first thing is to recognize that we all have biases."
For the women currently pursuing careers in medicine, the workshops focused more on mastering the practical skills of career advancement. The workshops covered negotiating techniques, how to create and benefit from a circle of advisers and mentors, and strategies for success in academic medicine.
Negotiation is key because it represents direct interaction with those whom Dr. Valian calls "the gatekeepers" — those people who ultimately decide who progresses up the leadership ladder.
"For women to excel, they also need respect and admiration from gatekeepers, the people who decide whether women's grants will be funded, whether their papers will be published in important journals, whether they will be promoted, whether their ideas will be taken seriously," Dr. Valian says. "We want women to have high aspirations — to change their field of study and to change the world — but women cannot have those aspirations if the people around them do not have high expectations for them."
Photography by Amelia Panico.