UNM is teaming up with two other research institutions to determine why an estimated 40 percent of women leave academic medicine before they’ve spent seven years in the field.
The study will evaluate the effectiveness of three national programs that aim to give women resources to succeed as teachers in the medical field. The study will focus on those who have attended these training programs in the past 20 years and find out if they have remained in academic medicine and whether they were promoted more than their colleagues who didn’t attend the programs.
Deborah Helitzer, assistant dean for research education at the UNM School of Medicine and principal investigator in the study, said women are sent to workshops to learn essential skills needed to succeed as leaders.
“The hypothesis of those trainings is that by training women they will be more likely to stay in academic medicine,” she said.
Two of the programs to be evaluated are the Early Career Women Faculty Professional Development Seminar and the Mid-Career Women Faculty Professional Development Seminar, which are offered through the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The third program to be evaluated is the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program for Women, which is offered through Drexel University College of Medicine.
Helitzer said 130 medical schools across the country send women to these workshops.
Researchers from multiple universities — including the UNM Health Sciences Center, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Drexel University College of Medicine — will conduct the study and should finish by August 2013.
The National Institute of Health awarded a grant of more than $300,000 to UNM for the study, according to the NIH Web site.
According to a UNM press release, UNM received one of 14 grants to complete this study.
Helitzer said one reason women don’t stay in academic medicine is that they aren’t given the skills they need to do their jobs, which include research, teaching and clinical service experience.
To be promoted as a doctor, Helitzer said a candidate must be excellent in two of the three categories and competent in the third.
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“Some of the skills that we need in academic medicine are different than the skills they got, for example, going to medical school,” she said. “We didn’t learn to do research, really, and we didn’t learn to teach, and then we didn’t learn to balance priorities and we didn’t learn to negotiate how much we would work and how much we would spend outside of work.”
Helitzer said that after she graduated from medical school, she was expected to teach based on what she had seen her professors do in class.
“You don’t just get up and give a PowerPoint,” she said. “Teaching is more involved than that, so I think that’s part of the problem. We’re not taught how to develop a syllabus. We’re not taught how to think about what we want students to learn and how to achieve that.”
Helitzer said men have the same problems, but they solve them with a different attitude. Studies have shown that women don’t negotiate for promotions as much as men.
“Teaching us to ask is a very important thing,” she said. “So ask for a raise, ask for a better office, ask for support for sending me to training.”
When completed, researchers will present their findings to senior leaders who will decide whether to write policies that require institutions to send women to these trainings.
