BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:

• Increasing the number of women and other underrepresented groups in medicine (URMs) is a critical public health need, as increasing representation at the medical faculty level improves health care access, quality and research for women and URMs
• Yoo et al. (JAMA Network Open, 2022) quantified the representation of women and URMs among US medical schools

METHODS:

• Retrospective cross-sectional study
  • US allopathic medical schools participating in the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Faculty Administrative Management Online User System
  • 1990 to 2019
• Study design
  • URMs assessed included including American Indian and Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
  • Data based on self-identification
• Primary outcome
  • Trends and variability in representation quotient (RQ)
    • Defined as representation of a group (i.e., proportion of total faculty) within an institution’s faculty compared to its respective US county

RESULTS:

• 1990: 121 AAMC member institutions (72,076 faculty) | 2019: 144 institutions (184,577 faculty)
• Median RQ of women faculty increased by 1.4% per year
  • 1990: RQ 0.42 (IQR, 0.37 to 0.46)
  • 2019: RQ 0.80 (IQR, 0.74 to 0.89)
  • Slope +1.4% per year | P<0.001
• The median RQ of Black faculty increased by 0.5% per year, but remained low in 2019
  • 1990: RQ 0.10 (IQR, 0.06 to 0.22)
  • 2019: RQ 0.22 (IQR, 0.14 to 0.41)
  • Slope +0.5% per year | P<0.001
• The median RQ of Hispanic faculty decreased
  • 1990: RQ 0.44 (IQR, 0.19 to 1.22)
  • 2019: RQ 0.34 (IQR, 0.23 to 0.62)
  • Slope −1.7% per year | P<0.001
• Absolute total change in RQ of URM showed an increase, but the 30-year slope did not differ from zero
  • Slope +0.1% per year | P=0.052
• The RQ of women faculty increased for most institutions: 88.2%
• Trends in RQ for URM faculty showed more variation across institutions
  • Increased RQ: 39.6% of institutions
  • Decreased RQ: 6.9% of institutions
• Nearly one-quarter of institutions shifted from the top to bottom 50th percentile institutional ranking by URM RQ when shifting from a national to a county-based comparison

CONCLUSION:

• Representation of women among US medical faculty has broadly improved since 1990, although representation of URMs has improved only modestly with a decrease among the Hispanic population
• The authors state

The findings of this cross-sectional study suggest that little progress has been made in URM representation among medical school faculty when contextualized with matched regional demographics 

Learn More – Primary Sources:

Institutional Variability in Representation of Women and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups Among Medical School Faculty

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