Leading Gender Diversity: Examining Changes in Female Representation in Faculty Across Three Years of CME Symposia and Webcasts

A recent study by Kamran et al found that the representation of women as US medical college faculty increased  from 14.8% in 1977 to 43.3% in 2019, but has still not reached the 50.5% of women in the US population.  At PER^®, we are working to increase gender diversity in faculty who present at continuing medical education programs. This project looks at the impact of our work to increase the number of female faculty presenting at oncology symposia and webcasts across 4 years, 2018-2021, with a goal of analyzing the number of women who are faculty and determining if there is a reduction in the number of all-male speaking panels (“manels”).

Educational Strategy:

We will look at the faculty who presented across oncology topics, including hematology/oncology, at PER-developed CME symposia and webcasts between January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2021. We will use the program files archived in the PER database, analyze the data by content type, eg hematology vs solid tumor oncology, and also review the faculty presenting at gender-associated oncology topics, such as breast cancer, gynecologic oncology, and urology. The primary endpoint is to determine if more women are being included as hematology/oncology symposium faculty over time. Secondary endpoints include seeing if there is a reduction in all-male panels, and if there is a trend to include more women in traditionally male-associated oncology topics, eg urology. A statistical analysis will be run to determine if any differences see are statistically significant.

Patient-Level Outcome(s) Measured:

A recent study conducted at Johns Hopkins found that patients who are seen by healthcare professionals who resemble them have longer office visits, by as much as 2.2 minutes, and report better scores on scales of trust in their healthcare team. Studies of faculty teaching at US medical colleges show that there has been a significant increase in female faculty, but the numbers overall have not yet reached population numbers. The goal of this project is to determine if there is a trend to include more women in positions of teaching experts at hematology/oncology CME programs, to see if gender diversity is increasing in the faculty overall, with a view to seeing if PER efforts to encourage diverse faculty are working, and where gaps may remain, for example in subspecialties. Our results may also serve as a potential reflection of women moving into senior positions in hematology/oncology academic posts, as this is the most common source of CME faculty.