Study shows women promoted more slowly

The Journal Sentinel staff

Sex discrimination may account for why female physicians in medical schools are promoted more slowly to senior faculty ranks than men only about one-fifth as likely to achieve full professor status, for example according to a study by the Medical College of Wisconsin.

After 11 years on medical school faculties, only 5% of women compared with 23% of men in the study had been promoted to full professors, said the report to be published in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Bonnie J. Tesch, assistant professor of general internal medicine, said Tuesday in an interview the phenomenon was not so much a glass ceiling as "a sticky floor. The women studied just tend to stay at the lower level."

Tesch and her colleagues at the Wauwatosa medical school studied 153 women and 263 men who joined medical school faculties in 1980 and their subsequent careers.

Fifty-nine percent of women compared with 83% of men had achieved associate or full professor rank at the end of the 11-year study period in 1991, Tesch said.

The men and women were similarly prepared for their academic careers in terms of board certification, advanced degrees and research during fellowship training, she said.

One difference found by the study: Men at the start of their faculty careers were given more resources, such as office space or laboratory space.

Men also were more likely to begin their careers with grant money and to be given more time for research, Tesch said.

She said women may be less effective at negotiating better academic resources with institutions when initially appointed to faculties. That could result in putting women behind men from the very beginning, she said.

But, she said, the question remains: Why does it take women longer to get there?

In the study, Tesch wrote, "Discrimination on the basis of gender has been shown to exist in academic medicine, and the slower promotion of women faculty may be due to gender bias, however unintended.

"Gender bias could also affect department chairs in their decisions regarding the appropriate time to propose women for promotion," the study said.

"Unfortunately, the notion that women take longer than men to achieve higher academic ranks in schools of medicine has been well accepted for some time," an accompanying editorial said.

"Having data to support this notion provides an impetus to develop an action plan to remedy this discrepancy," wrote Catherine D. DeAngelis, vice president for academic affairs and faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

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