Commitment to inclusion: The importance of collaboration in gender equity work

Abstract

Despite decades of faculty professional development programs created to prepare women for leadership, gender inequities persist in salary, promotion, and leadership roles. Indeed, men still earn more than women, are more likely than women to hold the rank of professor, and hold the vast majority of positions of power in academic medicine. Institutions demonstrate commitment to their faculty’s growth by investing resources, including creating faculty development programs. These programs are essential to help prepare women to lead and navigate the highly matrixed, complex systems of academic medicine. However, data still show that women persistently lag behind men in their career advancement and salary. Clearly, training women to adapt to existing structures and norms alone is not sufficient. To effectively generate organizational change, leaders with power and resources must commit to gender equity. This article describes several efforts by the Office of Faculty in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to broaden inclusivity in collaborative work for gender equity. The authors are women and men leaders in the Office of Faculty, which is within the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine dean’s office and includes Women in Science and Medicine. Here, we discuss potential methods to advance gender equity using inclusivity based on our institutional experience and on the findings of other studies. Ongoing data collection to evaluate programmatic outcomes in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine will be reported in the future.