Women faculty: an analysis of their experiences in academic medicine and their coping strategies

Background: Women represent a persistently low proportion of faculty in senior and leadership roles in medical schools, despite an adequate pipeline.

Objectives: This article highlights women's concerns in the context of the academic medical culture in which they work, and considers the ways in which they cope with and resist marginalizing situations.

Methods: To explore the experiences of faculty in academic medicine, a multidisciplinary faculty research team conducted 96 open-ended interviews with faculty representing a broad set of disciplines at 4 different career stages (early career, leaders, plateaued, and left academic medicine) in 5 medical schools. Coded data from interview transcripts indicated situations in which women were marginalized. Experiences of marginality were examined through a systematic secondary analysis of a subset of 17 representative cases using qualitative analysis.

Results: Women had a sense of "not belonging" in the organization, perceiving themselves as cultural outsiders and feeling isolated and invisible. They described barriers to advancement, including bias and gender role expectations. Faculty from underrepresented minority groups and PhDs perceived a double disadvantage. Four strategies were identified that helped women cope with and resist professional barriers: self-silencing, creating microenvironments, balancing life and work, and simultaneously holding dual identities--being successful in the organization while trying to change the culture.

Conclusions: Although the sample size was small, this analysis found that many women faculty perceive themselves as outsiders within academic medicine. Because of their marginalization, minority and non-minority women are more able to see the bias and exclusion that may operate in academic medical centers as well as other problematic dimensions of the culture. As cultural outsiders, women may be better able to advance change to improve academic medical culture. A next step is to leverage women's awareness to develop a broader vision of what that culture can and should be like.