In September, our department was honored to take part in the Women in Medicine Summit, a conference designed to amplify the lives of women in medicine and work towards gender parity in healthcare. The meeting highlighted a range of topics from strategies for building a successful career in medicine to re-discovering your personal relationships. In addition to presentations by faculty, many of the section chiefs had opportunity to complete inclusive leadership/ally training. This conference is critical at a time when there are known gender disparities that persist in the national surgical landscape, especially at senior faculty level. Nationally, women make up just 20.6% of general surgeons in the United States. This inequality extends to pay and advancement opportunities across the country. Despite the disparate representation, we recognize the evidence-based contribution of women in surgery: excellence in patient-centered decision-making, increased propensity for collaboration, and evidence of lower rates of adverse post-operative complications.
Greenup RA, Pitt SC. Women in Academic Surgery: A Double-Edged Scalpel. Acad Med. 2020;95(10):1483-1484. doi:10.1097/ACM.0000000000003592