Elections were held in May for AWN officers and counselors for the 1996-1997 academic year. The new officers are: Sherida Tollefsen, President; Diane Merritt, President-Elect; Susan Mallory, Secretary; and, Kathleen Sheehan, Treasurer. Elected to serve a two year term as counselors were Patricia Cole and Karen O’Malley. Barbara Monsees and Susan Wente will be serving the second year of their two year terms as counselors. A strategy session will be held in August to begin planning events for the upcoming year.

The Academic Women’s Network Leadership awards are presented annually to women in the graduating classes of the M.D. and Ph.D. programs who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in service to or advancement of women within the community. Nominations were solicited from our members and from women in the 1996 graduating classes for these awards. The recipients of this year’s awards were Lora Hooper, Rose Baghdady and Hilarie Cranmer.

Lora Hooper completed her Ph.D work in Jacques Baenziger’s laboratory and successfully defended her thesis this spring. In addition to her very impressive accomplishments in carbohydrate research and a most outstanding thesis seminar, she is widely regarded as an excellent role model for other students. Lora will be doing post doctoral work with Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University.

Rose Baghdady received a combined M.A./M.D. degree this spring. She was the founding president for the Washington University chapter of AMWA and was the regional and national student coordinator for this organization. She was also instrumental in recruiting women to WUMS, regularly setting up breakfast get-togethers for visiting women applicants. After graduation, Rose will begin a residency in General Surgery at the University of California, Davis in Sacramento.

Hilarie Cranmer organized an annual day-long symposium for medical students on domestic violence and founded the Domestic Violence Action program which sponsors letter writing campaigns to Congress in support of anti-violence legislation. She is also described as an exemplary teacher by other students. Hilarie received her M.D. degree in May and will begin a residency in Emergency Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in July.

Was your favorite school/activity etc. missing from the last edition of the AWN Family Resource Handbook? A new edition of this popular handbook is being planned for this year. Please send information for updating the handbook to Joan Downey (Box8116 or DOWNEY@A1KIDS) Useful materials include information on agencies for in-home care, day care centers, baby-sitting referrals, resources for a sick child or older kids, summer camps/activities, family entertainment in St. Louis and resources for the elderly.

Former AWN member Elaine Krul, now at Monsanto, has arranged for Monsanto to provide AWN with $5000 to support the costs of printing and distribution of this document. As a result, the handbook will be available not only to members of the Washington University community but also to employees of Monsanto.

Name ______________________________

Phone: ______________________________

Resource (day care, elder care, camps etc.)

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Despite years of efforts to bolster the presence of women in medical education as both students and faculty, male medical school professors today outnumber women professors by 10 to 1. To achieve a better gender balance, the AAMC has launched a new national initiative to make medical school and teaching hospital leaders more aware of the barriers women face in moving up the academic medicine ladder, help initiate necessary cultural changes in medical school communities, and provide women with enhanced mentoring and support as they pursue careers in medical education.

"Failing to achieve a greater balance between women and men is simply not an option if academic medicine is to meet the leadership challenges it faces," said AAMC President Jordan J. Cohen, M.D. "Men, as well as women, must urge the shattering of barriers to gender balance as our issue--our joint social obligation--if we are to achieve success." This initiative, "Increasing Women’s Leadership in Academic Medicine" was developed by an AAMC committee of medical school deans, teaching hospital leaders, faculty, and students. The committee contends that women continue to be blocked disproportionately from achieving leadership positions in academic medicine for a host of complex reasons. To help medical schools and teaching hospitals enhance the leadership of women, the AAMC committee has published a document providing 15 recommendations for medical schools, organized into three major areas: Developing and Mentoring Women Faculty, Administrators, Residents, and Students; Improving Pathways to Leadership; and Fostering Readiness to Change.

A separate committee will monitor the implementation of the Women’s Leadership initiative, issuing periodic reports documenting exemplary programs or particular problem areas to further assist medical schools and teaching hospitals. For a copy of the Women’s Leadership document fax Renee Marshall, (202) 828-1125 or e-mail rmarshall@aamc.org.

Editor's note: I obtained a copy of this document and it is well worth reading. Happily some of the recommendation (e.g.. supporting a women's faculty organization) are already in place at WUMS. Others will require effort on our part to aid in implementation. Over the next few issues of AWNings I will excerpt parts of the major sections of this document: Evidence of the Challenge, Diagnosis of the Challenge, Leadership Criteria in Academic Medicine, The Change Process and Recommendations.

(This is the first in a series of excerpts from the above report generated by the Project Committee of the AAMC.)

Introduction

Three inter-related rationales support a commitment by academic medical centers to gender equity:

1) Pragmatic. With the quandaries market-driven care is creating for individual physicians and academic centers, medicine’s need for truly compelling, moral and far-sighted leaders has never been greater. In order to survive, academic health centers must take the lead in patient recruitment, community alliances, and quality assurance. Chief administrators must be skilled at inspiring a commitment to service and at capturing the best payer mix. This tall order will not be met if medicine continues its traditional search methods (e.g. over relying on the grapevine to identify candidates) and if executives do not reflect the diversity of their constituents and the communities they serve. Since they choose primary care at a substantially higher rate than men, women physicians are becoming increasingly valuable to medical centers engaged in shifting from acute care specialty medicine to primary care preventive medicine. Moreover, women make the majority of health decisions for their families, frequently personally preferring a woman physician.

2) Principaled. Assuring an educational and work environment respectful and hospitable to all is part of medicine’s social contract. But surveys of medical students, residents, faculty and patients consistently reveal that women experience more mistreatment than men. Physicians, especially in educational settings, are absolutely obligated to hold themselves and each other to high standards of professional behavior; for instance, individuals who regularly tell offensive jokes should be brought to task rather than tolerated. Health care professionals also have an ethical duty to ensure that personal bias and gender stereotypes do not interfere with their responsibilities to individual patients and to students. Deans, department heads, and attending physicians bear particularly crucial responsibilities for setting, exemplifying and implementing standards.

3) Preventive. Increasing the number of prominent women as role models would add diversity and balance to the leadership. Women more than men medical students evince and maintain a social responsibility ethic, are more resistant to cynicism, and are more sensitive to the emotions of others. The presence of women seeking to combine family and professional responsibilities is making it easier for men to play a greater role in their children's lives as well. More family-friendly policies may help to offset decreases in the decision-making autonomy of physicians and in salaries and guarantees of tenure.

In order to prevent costly sex discrimination litigation, medical centers need to examine faculty hiring, promotion and salary practices to make sure they are equitable. Inequitable practices often result in severe morale problems and much wasted energy.

Evidence of the Challenge

In internal medicine, 22% of full-time faculty are women (compared to 25% of all faculty being women), 7% of all full professors in internal medicine are women (compared to 10% of full professors in all departments), and one woman chairs a department. Presently, about 115 women chair a medical school department which is double the number counted in 1983 but women still constitute less than 5% of all academic chairs. Currently, four U.S. medical schools have a woman dean in place. (Ed. Note: At WUMS, combining women at all levels from assistant professor to full professor, women represent 10% of the faculty and there are no women who are chairmen).

Even though there are now over 20,000 women full-time faculty at U.S. medical schools, there are on average fewer than 16 women full professors per medical school, including non-tenured and basic sciences faculty, compared to 155 men per school. In 1980, the percentage of all women faculty at the rank of professor was 9% and 15 years later has still not broken 10% (the proportion of men at this rank has remained stable at 32%). Thus, isolation is still a problem for these women, and as a recent Science article notes: "isolated individuals not only lack social psychological support, but also the social capital underlying success."

Impressed by the bright and energetic young women entering medicine, many have concluded that proportionate increases in the number of women at the top will inevitably follow. Cohort studies reveal, however, that women faculty are not progressing at the same rate or to the same extent as men. After a mean of 11 years on a medical school faculty, 23% of a national sample of men but only 5% of women had achieved full professor rank. A study of internal medicine faculty found men and women’s research and academic productivity to be equivalent, but women nonetheless received less compensation (adjusted for hours and specialty) and were less like (33%) than men (47%) to attain the rank of full or associate professor.

(Next: Diagnosis of the Challenge and Leadership Criteria in Academic Medicine)

The percentage of applications to NIH from female principal investigators has increased steadily over the past decade from 16% of the total in 1984 to 22% in 1993. This increase, combined with the increase in the total number of applications to NIH, means the number of applications from women has increased by 73% from 2,821 in 1984 to 4,883 in 1993.

Over the past decade, men have had somewhat higher success rates than women, but the gap has narrowed in recent years. In 1993, the success rate for male applicants was 24.1% while that for female applicants was 22.6%. Success rates for new applications have been similar for both groups over the decade, e.g. 17.8% for males and 18.1% for females in 1993. However, success rates for competing continuation applications have been higher for men, e.g., 40.2% for males vs. 38.4% for females in 1993.

There are no significant differences in the lengths of grants awarded to female or male principal investigators. However, the average size of grant awards to female investigators has been smaller than the average for male investigators. This appears to result primarily from the fact that women generally request smaller amounts than men.

Smaller budget requests from women and, thus, smaller grant sizes may be explained by the type of grant mechanism chosen. For example, new female investigators are more likely than are their male colleagues to have been funded by the FIRST awards mechanism, which provides a limited budget. The principal investigator of a program project grant, which is likely to be a large grant, is more likely to be a male rather than a female scientist.

Other factors which may contribute to the differences in grant size include the average age of female versus male principal investigators and the length of time a project has been funded. The data suggest that the largest factor contributing to differences in the average grant size by gender is the relative number of junior and senior investigators. Differences in the average grant size may be expected to shrink if the average age of female investigators (44.6 years in 1993) increases toward the average age of male investigators (46.6 years in 1993).

(Excerpted from Women in NIH Extramural Grant Programs, by Peter C. Preusch, Ph.D. NIGMS)

"The Source on Women’s Issues in Congress" reports a major victory for the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues. "The House voted in July to revive funding for the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA), which saw its funding eliminated in FY1996. Among the programs funded through WEAA are those that prevent teenage mothers from dropping out of school and initiatives to prevent sexual harassment in schools. Further, a broad, bipartisan coalition defeated an amendment to require minors to obtain parental consent before receiving services at Title X family planning clinics."

Also approved by the Senate was the Defense bill with significant increases in funding for health research. The bill would provide $150 million for the peer-reviewed breast cancer research program, a 100% increase over the 1996 level. The House bill would fund the program at $100 million. (As a matter of interest, prostate cancer research would receive $100 million, an enormous increase over the 1996 level of $7 million.)

Congress is taking seriously a new threat to women posed by the drug Rohypnol, also known as the "date rape drug". Rohypnol, the brand name for the chemical flunitrazepam, is also known as "roffies," the "forget pill," and the "date-rape drug." "Witnesses gave testimony concerning the increased international trafficking and abuse of Rohypnol and appropriate penalties the federal government should pursue." Sexual predators and street gangs take advantage of the sedative and memory-loss effects of Rohypnol to incapacitate women and commit sexual assault. The victim’s difficulty in remembering facts surrounding the incident compounds the problem of successfully rape prosecution for law enforcement agencies.

"Results of a comprehensive National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study designed to address the emotionally charged social issue of whether mothers put children at risk by working outside the home, found that child care in and of itself neither adversely affects, nor promotes, the security of children’s attachment to their mothers at the 15-month-age point." "The results show that infant child care does not damage the child’s attachment to the mother except under circumstances where that relationship is already at risk, specifically if the mother is already having trouble responding in ways that help to foster attachment with her child. In those cases, a child’s being in child care that is of poor quality or in many hours of child care can put the mother/child relationship at additional risk."

This was the title of a New York Time’s article on Dr. Shirley M. Tilghman, single mother and scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Princeton University. In May, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The article reported that "she and many others have noticed lately that women are just not breaking into the top ranks of science at nearly the rate that their sheer numbers suggest they should. Many women drop out of science at every point along the professional pipeline. So Dr. Tilghman has become something of an agitator for the cause of women in Science."

Coming this Fall--two AWN-sponsored brown bag lunches: Helen Kornblum and Lynne Kipnis will share ways they have worked with women to help them recognize gender differences and how to use increased awareness and emotional sophistication to navigate in a male designed and dominate system. Topics covered will include achieving visibility, competition and envy between women, marginalization, leadership styles and setting limits. They are also interested in hearing from you regarding the topics you would like addressed in the future.