Too few women in academic medicine, says report

Study finds only 21 per cent of clinical academic workforce is female - News Release

Imperial College London News Release

For immediate release
Monday 24 September 2007

Female medics are underrepresented in the UK clinical academic workforce, especially at the most senior levels, according to a new study published this month in the Journal of Medical Education.

The study looked at clinical academics - researchers who are also medical professionals - at all 32 medical schools in the UK during the years 2004 and 2005. It found that women made up a relatively small percentage of the total clinical academic workforce, representing just 21 per cent. This is in spite of the fact that more women are entering the medical profession than men and now form over 60 per cent of the medical student body.

The report's authors, from Imperial College London, the University of Bristol and the Medical Schools Council, say their findings imply that some workforce practices are detrimental to women’s clinical academic careers. The authors believe that current policies are not effective in ensuring that men and women are treated equally. They urge the sector to work more actively to recruit and retain senior academic medical women and to improve its record on gender equality.

The authors discovered that women made up a very small proportion of the workforce at the most senior levels, with only one in ten medical clinical professors being female. 207 men became professors during the year 2004 to 2005, but only six women professors were appointed. At the onset of the study period, six medical schools employed no female professors at all.

The authors found wide variation between different medical schools. In 2004, the University of Oxford had 28 medical professors and the University of Southampton had 25, none of which were women. In contrast, King's College London and Queen Mary's College had higher than average percentages of female professors, at 16 per cent (15 out of 92) and 19 per cent (9 out of 48), respectively.

Dr Anita Holdcroft, one of the authors of the study from the Division of Surgery, Oncology, Reproductive Biology and Anaesthetics at Imperial College London, said: "Until now we have had no UK gender data. This study has confirmed that women doctors are not achieving senior positions in academic medicine despite adequate numbers of women medical students and academic trainees.

"For women doctors there is a choice of employers and this study suggests that women choose the NHS route for career advancement in preference to higher education. In industry we know that diversity in staffing at senior levels is a key element in their success and so for medical schools to maximise their competitiveness in the 21st century they need to reflect the population they serve," she added.

A 2005 National Institute of Economic and Social Research report into the recruitment and retention of academic staff in higher education found that women faced difficulties in promotion. The report, which did not include clinical academics, suggested a number of reasons for this. For example, women spent more time teaching, resulting in less research output; the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) valued research as a measure of competence for promotion; and women's career pathways had less mobility and more part-time working than those of men. The authors of the new report say that their research suggests that clinical academic women are facing the same difficulties.

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Notes to editors:

1. "Women in the UK academic medicine workforce" Journal of Medical Education, September issue

Bhupinder Sandhu(1), Ceri Margerison(2) and Anita Holdcroft(3)*

(1) Department of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Royal Hospital for Children, Bristol, UK
(2)Medical Schools Council,formerly the Council of Heads of Medical Schools, London, UK
(3)Department of Anaesthesiology, Imperial College London and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital London, UK
*Corresponding author

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