Diversity & Inclusion In the News

Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, released a statement on June 12 calling for an end to all-male panels at scientific conferences After listening to concerns about all-male panels (sometimes referred to as "manels") at scientific conferences for many years, Collins announced that he would no longer participate in panels that featured only men.

According to Collins' statement, "Starting now, when I consider speaking invitations, I will expect a level playing field, where scientists of all backgrounds are evaluated fairly for speaking opportunities. If that attention to inclusivenes is not evident in the agenda, I will decline to take part. I challenge other scientific leaders across the biomedical enterprise to do the same."

UAB now will provide up to four weeks of paid parental leave for eligible employees expecting the birth or adoption of a child. Even better, employees can redeem the new benefit before exhausting their available paid and unpaid leave.

The new policy, signed by President Ray Watts and slated to be available no later than July 2016, is a collaborative effort between the UAB administration and Faculty Senate that built on an earlier proposal by the Commission of the Status of Women. The benefit aligns the university with the rare U.S. employers that provide gender-neutral, paid parental leave.

The potential of women in medicine and science, like those in many other professions, has not been fully realized. When compared with men, women in women and medicinethese fields are paid less, have higher rates of attrition, have fewer scientific publications, and are less likely to apply for NIH funding and to be principal investigators. It is not surprising, therefore, that women are less likely to advance to the highest ranks in academic medicine.

In this issue of JAMA, Jena and colleagues and Sege and colleagues add to the existing literature by providing data from new sources. . . . Jena et al found that in a cohort of more than 90,000 physicians in academic medicine centers, including more than 30,000 women, women were less likely than men to be full professors (11.9% vs 28.6%).

by Dr. Atul Grover, The Wall Street Journal

Inspired by the #ILookLikeAnEngineer social-media campaign that challenges gender stereotypies in the engineering profession, North Carolina surgery resident Health Logghe, tired of patients and colleagues who assume she can't be a surgeon, recently mounted her own campaign, #ILookLikeASurgeon. It takes on the stereotype of surgery in particular and medicine in general as professions dominated by men. Not surprisingly, the campaign struck a nerve and went viral.