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Talking about diversity is in these days – and perhaps even more than that. However, quota is not what I want to discuss in the following, as I strongly believe that the success of any business, in particular that of academic medicine, depends on selecting and hiring the best talent, regardless of its provenience.

What I want to convince you of today is that our Department cannot afford to cut itself off of close to half of the talent in our recruitment reservoir. What does this mean? During the last years, 40-50% of the first year medical students at U of M were women. Currently, 36% of the residents in our Department are women. Both percentages are even higher in most other medical schools/institutions in Canada. However, only 28% of our GFT faculty are women (with a wide variation depending on the section ranging from 9% in GIM, 11% in ICU, and 14% in Cardiology, to 67% in Rheumatology and in Infectious Diseases, respectively). In addition, the percentage of women decreases further in leadership positions and, in particular, in the “full professor” academic rank (see Table below).

Table: Gender Diversity in the Dept. of Internal Medicine (Oct 2017)¹

	Men (n)	Women (n)	Total (n)	% Women
All Faculty  (GFT and non-GFT)	221	96	317	30
GFT Faculty	138	54	192	28
Assistant Professor  (GFT only)	84	35	119	29
Associate Professor (GFT only)	24	14	38	37
Professor (GFT only)	30	5	35	14
Section Heads	14	4	18	22
Executive Committee	22	6	28	21
Senior Advisory Committee	4	1	5	20

¹primary appointments only

Thus, we clearly lose women along the career trajectory from medical school to residency to faculty and leadership positions. You may interject that this is a cohort effect, but I respectfully disagree, it is not the full story: two decades ago, women already represented close to half of medical school graduates in many medical schools. I would also submit that talent is equally distributed between female and male medical students and residents. The correct question, therefore, is what are the barriers that hinder women to proceed through the ranks and into leadership positions as well as their male colleagues?

The answers are probably multifaceted. Of course there are biological facts – women give birth and breast feed. I am not suggesting we can change that. The point, however, is that we, our Department and its academic physician community, are not yet willing enough to take these biological facts into account and accommodate them in order to profit from talent. Why is it so hard to come up with positions that are temporarily part time (of course, with proportionately adjusted income) allowing to scale back, when children are young, gradually scaling back up again, as their needs change? Why do we offer so few, if any job sharing, models? And if we allow them, why are those who come back full time after a while penalized for, in relation to their time after graduation, “thinner academic CV”, without taking their part time leave into account? BTW: this all does not only affect women – more and more of today’s men choose to take paternity leave (or would choose to take it, if it would be better aligned with cultural and professional expectations, as it is e.g. in Scandinavia).

Then there is what has been termed “institutional reproduction”. Institutions tend to be organized and governed in ways that transmit their institutional norms from generation to generation. The choice of role models and their recognition as such is part of this, as is recruitment and promotion. Individuals become socialized to expect things to be, and to behave, the way they see and perceive it every day in their institution; they cannot emulate and live up to behaviors and cultures that are invisible in their work environment. Women will lose interest in becoming a leader in an institution where they cannot identify with individuals in leadership positions. Conversely, there is ample evidence supporting that the achievements of women are frequently underestimated/undervalued during hiring and promotion processes in a male dominated institutional culture.

Most importantly perhaps, are unconscious biases, believes and role expectations we have for ourselves and others due to gender specific socialization processes during our upbringing. We all have those unconscious biases, even the most equity aware of us – and not only in relation to gender. When I first heard women colleagues talk to me about unconscious bias related to women in medicine, I felt offended, as I perceived myself as treating colleagues equally based on their accomplishments, irrespective of gender. Hearing and reading more about unconscious biases, I realize that I have them too – we all have them, even our woman colleagues in medicine. Acknowledging this as a fact, should not be construed to serve as an excuse, nor does it imply to blame somebody for them.  And as always, awareness is the first step to deal with the issue.

Let me give you a personal example. In a competitive field such as academic medicine, I had always expected that colleagues are ambitious, self-confident, and will eagerly – sometimes too eagerly – take on new tasks and responsibilities when asked for. In fact, many would see these as career opportunities and actively seek them. I was somewhat surprised to learn that some of the most talented colleagues perceive themselves as not talented enough to pursue such opportunities when they present; they need to be talked into accepting them – and then prove to be highly successful. Gender specific socialization facilitates the former in men, the latter in women – also in medicine. As a corollary, this may translate into a work place culture that many talented women – and increasingly men – do not want to be part of.

There are many more examples that demonstrate how widespread unconscious gender bias is. In fact, there is a whole scientific literature on this, of which I just want to mention one stunning example here.  A study published in the high impact journal PNAS found that the likelihood of investing in the same start-up company was 37.1% if the pitched was made by a female voice, but 68.7% if the identical pitch was made by a male voice (Brooks, Huang, Kearney & Murray, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014; 111: 4427-4431).

It is not about telling women to “toughen up”, it is about our department/professional community recognizing the fact that we all have gender specific socialization schemes and need to adapt our culture to them, if we want to profit from all available talent.

Academic medicine, in general, and our Department, in particular, is dependent on all talent we can tap into. Cutting ourselves off from half of it is a big mistake! To avoid this will need efforts to listen and to respect differing perceptions and opinions, as well as our willingness to adapt how we do business.

Discussions on the “women in medicine” theme have started at our recent departmental retreat. I hope they will continue. I hope that the task force that is currently being established comes up with proposals to address the issues. Stay tuned to hear more.

As individuals, we may have different views of a particular problem and may pursue various (often vested) interests in trying to resolve it. And that’s OK. In fact, it is enriching and stimulating to bring all these different views to the table.    Solutions for complex problems found in an open, respectful exchange of diverging opinions – collaborative team solutions – are usually better than those initially proposed by each single individual involved.

That said, finding a solution requires commitment; first of all, the commitment to get involved and participate in the  collaborative process. It is worth stressing in this context that refusing to participate, when given the opportunity, is rarely a profitable solution. If one declines to participate, somebody else will substitute and argue on one’s behalf – and this runs the risk that that somebody will be less apt to the challenge than the one who has chosen to stay on the side line. Also, by standing off side in finding solutions, by forfeiting to bring one’s opinion to the table, one loses the legitimation to complain about the later outcome. This applies also to leadership positions one might be asked to take on…

Finding a solution for a complex problem requires further to keep in mind the greater good of which each of us is “only” a part. Finding a solution requires a   willingness to accept that no one can have everything he/she wants, that there needs to be a give and take from all parties involved, always keeping in mind the greater good we choose to aim to achieve together as a team, as a program, as Department, as an institution.

Why choose? Aren’t we rather forced to aim for what somebody “above us” decided, whether we like it or not? Who has not thought in more than one  instance that “those above” are incompetent, if not worse? “We” powerless sufferers – “them” having all the say.  Where is the choice here?

Well, didn’t we make the decision to work where we work? There are always alternatives.  We could move somewhere else, do something else – if we would choose to accept the  consequences. Could, that we don’t, indicate that we have at least deep down some  common ground, some common view of that greater good?

OK, but does our individual view, our opinion really count? If not by “them”, are we not just being pushed around and played with by “the system”? That’s not a valid excuse either. Who is “the system”? Is “the system” not made up of all of us? Let’s think of our Health Care System – if there is such a thing at all (see recommended reading). Now take away the people it (should) serve(s), then the people working in it. Would it still exist? I doubt it. There is no such thing as an abstract, amorphous system devoid of people. We, the sum of all individual people in it make “the system”, define what it is, how it looks like, how it works (or not), each of us in his/her own specific place.

Let’s continue to try hard to shape “the system” of our health care, each in his/her place, to find sustainable solutions for its many complex problems, each of us contributing his/her view, always respectful of other opinions, collaboratively, and always with that greater good in mind that we choose to work for: the benefit of our patients today and in the      future.

BTW: we don’t need to become altruistic saints, as this is of course also for our own benefit. We will all likely become patients at some point. Hopefully without being put in a situation forcing us to admit that we refuse to be the patient of a health care  system of which we are/were a member, to modify a famous Groucho Marx quote.

Recommend Reading:

Henry Mintzberg “Managing the Myths of Health Care” Berrett-Kohler Publisher, 2017. 

Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world

 

Rochester is a small town (population less than 120,000) in rural Minnesota. But it is also the home of the world renowned Mayo clinic. Similar to Winnipeg, there are mosquitoes in Rochester and the winters are cold. Similar to Winnipeg, there is no Silicon Valley and no Boston/Cambridge-like biomedical research hub in its vicinity. Nevertheless, Mayo stands worldwide for excellence in health care delivery, research and education. Why do I mention this? Well, because it tells us that quality and success do not depend on location, but, at least to a large part, on attitude, on our will to strive for making it better with more in our view than just the local market, each of us in his/her place, as a Department, as an Institution.

Some of the success of institutions like the Mayo is due to selecting the “right” talent, or cherry picking, as some may say. At least beyond a certain point, success is also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy – talent seeks to join talent in order to propel itself to the next level. And the opposite is true too, it is hard to attract talent to an environment where it feels little valued and perceives that its chance to develop and grow is limited. Constantly excusing ourselves as being able to compete “only” for the size of the mosquitoes because we are “only” in Winterpeg does not exactly help either. Better then to give up our ambitions, accept that we are not able to cherry pick like the Mayo, settle for what we do reasonably well and train “only” local physicians for the local market?

That would be wrong on several accounts. Firstly, training (home grown) physicians for Manitoba is not a second class task, but a noble obligation that serves Manitoba’s population. That said, and secondly, I strongly believe it is also our mandate to train the next generation of academic physicians who will advance the field through research and innovation and sustain, in the decades to come, education and training of the next generation of physicians for the community. Both, training the future community physicians and training the future academic innovators are intimately linked; one will fall apart without the other.

Accepting this dual obligation begs multiple questions including whether one size still truly fits all, i.e. whether it might be more effective and efficient to implement separate community and academic training tracks. Both career goals are of equal importance and none, nor their trainees, must be valued over the other. Compromising on quality standards to assure “producing” the required number of physicians for each destination can however not be an option. If need comes, we all want to be treated by a competent professional.

Equality has become a hot buzz word everywhere these days; it may sometimes cook so hot that it boils over, potentially running the danger of turning into (inadvertent) reverse discrimination.  Despite this, equality clearly remains of pivotal importance. However, equality means equality of access, not equality of outcome, i.e. equal access to a program/institution, not quasi-guaranteed progression through the ranks once one is accepted into it. In fact, in most instances and as a first iteration, talent and skill sets can be expected to be close to normally distributed. Assuming that all entering will in the end meet the bar is assuming that candidate selection is perfect and the selection process can perfectly predict the future outcome; or, alternatively, is turning a blind eye on the outliers on the left side of the distribution curve who fail to fulfill quality standards despite all efforts and supports.

Thus, perhaps, we should stop shying away from being ambitious – why should it not be possible to build in Winnipeg what was possible to build in small town Minnesota? And maybe, we need, indeed, to allow ourselves to cherry pick a bit more?

Eberhard Renner, MD