Dysfunctional pipelines and other insights from NIH conference on women in biomedical careers

Earlier this month I attended a conference at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on new interventions to help support women in biomedical research careers. You can view the webcast here.

A reoccurring theme was that a critical mass of women going into research careers is not enough. Women make up roughly half of STEM Ph.D.s but just 20% of full professors.  I’ve heard the justification that women are dropping out of the pipeline to raise children. While this might be the case, research presented at the conference indicated women also left research because of lack of satisfaction. A large component of satisfaction was institutional culture – whether there was a perceived “old boys club” – and perceptions of fairness.

Additionally, women are not the only ones who want work/life balance. Reshma Jagsi’s, M.D., D.Phil., associate professor at University of Michigan Health System, survey or junior faculty found the vast majority of men and women reported a strong preference for work/life balance. In fact the top 3 or so career priorities were the same for both sexes. Still, women expressed a slightly stronger preference than men for work/life balance, which makes sense since Dr. Jagsi also found women had a higher burden of domestic chores and child-care responsibilities.

Even those women who stayed in academic research – the so-called survivors – don’t advance at the same rate as men. Phyllis Carr, M.D., FACP, associate physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, followed up on a 17-year faculty survey which spanned 24 U.S. medical schools. Though men and women stayed in academia at the same rate, men were more likely to have achieved senior rank. This difference could mostly be explained by men publishing more – the main measure of productivity in academia. However, men were still more than two times more likely to hold a senior leadership position, such as dean or chair, even when accounting for productivity.

It is figures like these that led Dr. Jagsi to posit if this was not just a leaky pipeline, but a dysfunctional one. Deborah Helitzer, Sc.D, dean of the college of population health at University of New Mexico, found women were more likely to hold positions such as vice dean, which fulfil housekeeping roles and are not as likely to lead to dean positions.

As the academic research community makes progress in certain measures, it becomes clearer that there are problems in other areas. For example, explicit sexism has decreased substantially over the decades, but research – some presented at the conference – shows implicit bias is still going strong.
So what’s the solution? Many types of interventions were presented. Many centered on supporting individual women through career development programs and mentoring networks. Others suggested ways to increase women in leadership positions such as implicit bias training for search committees and implementation of the Rooney rule, which requires a certain number of women and minorities on the short-list.

Others, still, called for an overhaul of the academic system, including eliminating tenure and emphasizing shorter, more flexible work hours with more administrative support from institutions. As a scientist-in-training I was advised to have children during graduate school by some, during my postdoc by others, and not until after tenure by others. But why should women try to bend their lives into a system created decades ago by men? Of course it continues to better serve men than women.
Some argue however that the current system isn’t serving anyone. I highly recommend Robin Ely and Irene Padavic’s article in the Huffington Post “Work-Family Conflict is Not the Problem. Overwork Is.” This is supported by Dr. Jagsi’s finding that both men and women want work/life balance, but as Ely and Padavic say in their article, men suffer in silence or reduce their hours under the radar. Which brings me to another point of the conference: men need to champion these types of solution, which benefit both sexes and science as a whole and women need to do a better job engaging men in their efforts.