A Message from the President's Desk

From the President’s Desk:

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the AWN board members for giving their time and energy to serve on the board this year and to Jan Konrad for her secretarial assistance throughout the year. It has been a busy year resulting in significant progress in a number of important areas which I will outline below.

Drs. Diana Gray & Karen O’Malley ran a workshop on “Development of a women’s faculty network: ensuring gender equity and capitalizing on collegial relationships” at the “Women in medicine regional leadership conference: successful strategies for women on academic medicine”, held in Memphis.

Diversity & Career Development Collection is now set up in the Becker Library. Information on the collection can be accessed at http://intramed.wustl.edu/medlib/awnrsrv.nsf. Thanks to Dr. Nancy Baenziger for setting up the collection.

AWN sponsored the 6th Annual Contemporary Women’s Health Symposium which was held in the Eric P. Newman Education Center on October 24th 2003. The meeting was well attended by community physicians, Washington University faculty, staff and students from both campuses (145 total). Many thanks to the co-chairs Diane Merritt and Janet Rader for organizing another outstanding symposium. The next symposium will be on Saturday January 22nd 2005, to coincide with the opening of a special exhibit “Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’s Health in Contemporary Art” at the Washington University Gallery of Art.

The AWN/AWF fall dinner was held on November 13th 2003 in the Eric P. Newman Center. Once again the fall dinner included a charity clothes drive for Dress for Success. The outfits collected were distributed to women of limited means entering their first professional job and was organized by Nancy Baenziger. The spring dinner was held on April 29th 2004 in the Eric P. Newman Center. The featured speaker was Sue Rosser, Dean of Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech and author of “Women, Science and Society: The crucial union”. Dr. Rosser spoke about the ADVANCE program (see below) initiatives that she has been involved in at Georgia Tech. During the dinner Jean Thurston, MD receive the Pioneering Women in Medicine and Science Award. The Faculty Mentor Awards went to Joel Perlmutter MD, Tamara Doering MD, PhD and Vicky Fraser MD. Student Leadership Awards went to Celeste Chu, MD and Karla Marz PhD. Many thanks to Abby Hollander, who organized both dinners.

Richard Gephardt nominated Drs. Jessie Ternberg and Teresa Vietti, on behalf of AWN, for a special exhibition on the changing face of medicine, cosponsored by Congress and the National Library of Medicine. The purpose of the exhibition is to highlight women physicians and includes 3 women from each state. Both women will be honored on the Local Legends website http://www.locallegends.org/. Dr. Ternberg was also chosen as the featured physician from Missouri, she attended the AMWA Annual Meeting in February and was interviewed by McNeil-Lehrer Production, for a feature on the DVD for the exhibition.

Dr. Abby Hollander chaired a breakout session on mentoring at the “Midwest Women in Medicine and Science” conference held in Kansas City.

The Dept of Medicine has submitted a K12 application to NIH to develop a multidisciplinary clinical research-training program. Dr. Alison Goate was asked to represent AWN on the advisory committee of the grant to promote recruitment, mentoring and professional development of female trainees.

AWN continues to provide bursaries to cover the cost of registration to enable women faculty to attend career development meetings.

An independent consultancy firm was asked by the Gender Equity Committee to complete a pay equity study. The report, presented earlier this year concluded that after controlling for the medical specialty and structural variables that legitimately predict pay, there were no significant differences in average pay levels between the groups. The full report can be found at http://wusmfacultyaffairs.wustl.edu under “Faculty News”. The GEC has also been addressing two other important issues, the low number of female endowed professors and the absence of a tenure stoppage document. I am pleased to report that there are now 8 endowed female professors in the medical school. AWN will be cosponsoring a reception to honor these endowed chairs on October 21st, 2004. The GEC will continue to work to increase the number of endowed chairs for female faculty. Among major medical schools we are currently the only school not to have a “tenure stoppage document” in place. The absence of such a document does not reflect well on Washington University when we are trying to recruit and retain outstanding faculty. The GEC has drawn up a draft document, which was approved by the Executive faculty of the Medical School and is currently under discussion by the Faculty Senate Council.

AWN cosponsored the Grant Writing Series again this year, although the series is now organized by Academic Publishing Services of the University. The series was run twice this year, in November and April, due to demand.

Dr. Nancy Baenziger has represented AWN at meetings with AWF to put together a survey to evaluate “Retention of women faculty”. This work is ongoing and will continue in the 2004-2005 academic year.

Drs. Maurine Linder and Susan Fitzpatrick have put together a new brown bag series on management issues, which will run this fall (9/22, 9/29 and 10/6). Look out for publicity coming soon.

ADVANCE: Institutional grants from NSF to increase the participation of women in the scientific work force through increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers. Following Dr. Sue Rosser’s discussion of this program at Georgia Tech at the Spring dinner Drs. Alison Goate and Susan Fitzpatrick brought the program to the attention of Dr. Diana Gray (Office of faculty affairs). Diana asked Susan to make a presentation to the Gender Equity Committee, who are interested in pursuing a Wash U proposal to NSF.

Alison Goate
AWN President 2003-2004