Women presented a median of 28.3 percent of the total sessions
WEDNESDAY, March 15, 2017 (HealthDay News) — Women seem to be underrepresented among academic grand rounds (GR) speakers, according to a research letter published online March 6 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Julie R. Boiko, M.D., from the University of California in San Francisco, and colleagues surveyed GR speaker series in clinical specialties and categorized speakers by trainee status, institutional affiliation, and gender. They compared the percentages of female speakers with workforce demographics.
Nine specialties met the inclusion criteria. The researchers found that women presented a median of 28.3 percent of the total sessions, ranging from 20 to 60.3 percent. Trainee-delivered sessions, which made up 2.3 to 24.1 percent of the total sessions, displayed comparable female and male speaker representation. Female representation ranged from 19.6 to 53.3 percent among sessions delivered by faculty or other nontrainees (median, 26.2 percent). When total nontrainee female speaker percentages were normalized to workforce demographic female percentages, the median ratios were 0.56, 0.61, and 0.79 for medical students, residents, and faculty, respectively.
“Women’s representation among academic GR speakers falls below the percentage of female medical students (46.7 percent) and residents (46 percent overall) and often falls lower than faculty (36 percent overall),” the authors write. “Representation of women at GR podiums reflects and potentially contributes to limited female retention in academic medicine.”
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