Despite Equality, Fewer Women Are Leaders in Med School
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Although women make up half of all U.S. first-year medical students, they volunteer for leadership roles in the classroom significantly less often than men, according to a new study from UCLA.
The study says subtle encouragement from teachers can even out the playing field by boosting female students’ willingness to identify themselves as leaders.
“We’re talking about a group of smart, talented women who worked very hard to get to this point in their academic careers,” said lead author Nancy Wayne, professor of physiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Yet under typical circumstances, they do not feel comfortable in a leadership role. Our study suggests this is something that teachers have the power to change.”
Wayne and her colleagues performed two studies, one in 2008 and another in 2009, to examine whether leadership of the classroom’s small groups slanted towards one gender, and whether teacher instruction had an effect on closing the gap.
In the 2008 study, 144 first-year medical students—about 75 women and 69 men—attended six small-group sessions in a course on reproductive physiology taught by Wayne.
Each session was broken down into groups of four or five students, for a total of 30 groups during the course.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTEach group was faced with a case-based problem for discussion. One student in each group had to volunteer to lead the discussion and present their answers to the rest of the class. Significantly fewer women volunteered – female students volunteered to lead only 10 of the 30 small groups, although they made up more than half of the class.
With a Little Encouragement, More Women Took Leadership Roles
In the 2009 study, the class was split in two, and then each half was divided into 15 groups. All 30 groups heard the same instructions as the class in the 2008 study. Half of the groups, however, also received a brief pep talk by Wayne emphasizing the importance of exploring a leadership role in the protected environment of the classroom.
“I explained that if you’ve never volunteered to be a group leader in other situations, this is a safe setting to try it out,” said Wayne. “It doesn’t matter what your background is, what your undergraduate major was, or whether you’re male or female – being a group leader is an important experience for everyone.”
In the half of the class that did not hear the pep talk, only four women volunteered to lead among the 15 small groups. In contrast, the half of the class that heard the talk split evenly between the number of female and male leaders.
Many of the leaders were students volunteering for the first time. “Our findings show that how we instruct our students can strongly influence whether we reinforce or eliminate gender bias in class leadership,” Wayne said.
Julianne Ip, head of the Program in Liberal Medical Education at Brown University, agrees with the results of the UCLA study.
“Often it is the female mentorship and seeing women in leadership roles that encourages women that they can ‘do it.’ Certainly that has been true at Brown for the PLME students,” Ip said. “However, it has been very interesting for me to see that over the years the top administrators at medical schools are usually men – there are many women in the next echelon but very few at the very top. Food for thought.”
Photo credit: Lauren Nelson