International Women's Day 2022: An interview with Barbara Burtness, Professor of Medical Oncology and Interim Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Yale Cancer Center

Professor Burtness provided the following interview to medicine@nkua (Newsletter of the Medical School of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens):

There is certainly a high prevalence of gender-specific challenges to career advancement among female global health trainees and professionals. What are the interventions that a medical school should take to address these challenges?

 BB: Medical schools should make commitments on multiple levels to bring about real change and set a level playing field for all trainees and professionals. Education about implicit bias that is interactive and recurring should be conducted schoolwide, and be mandatory. Among the experiences that exclude women, lead to attrition, and interfere with productivity, is sexual harassment, and schools should have transparent and muscular processes to hold those who have sexually harassed their colleagues and trainees accountable. It is important to promote women into leadership roles; since women are less likely to have received informal mentorship in leadership and are less likely to have been offered progressive leadership experience, formal leadership training for women is more important, and recognition of a track record as a mentor, team leader or innovator in less formal leadership roles can also be used as evidence of suitability for taking on a leadership role within the school. Considerable evidence points to the importance of increased representation of women on search committees, promotion committees, and review committees that control funding decisions.

In most institutions worldwide, women department chairs represent the minority. One of the gender-based challenges that has been reported in studies is “made to feel inferior”.  Female medical students lack leadership role models. Should gender-specific interventions start from the medical student level?

 BB: Offering networking opportunities, career advising, and creating opportunities for exposure to leadership through set-aside committee positions for women trainees and junior faculty, are important tools in career development. Coupled with serious efforts to bring about culture change and improve representation in leadership, these will allow us to fully include and benefit from the gifts of all our trainees and faculty.

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