Diversity News

Celebrating and Empowering Women in Surgery

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.

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