St Vincent’s lighting the path toward gender equity for Women in Medicine

16 Jun 2022

A group of women in medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital Network recently came together to form the Women in Medicine committee. The aim of the committee is to identify and challenge the inequities and unequal burdens for women in health care. As a group they raise important issues, start vital conversations and more importantly, strategise pathways towards equitable opportunities and experiences for women in health.

In order to achieve real change, the group determined that a crucial part of addressing gender inequities would require a comprehensive understanding of the breadth and depth of challenges faced by women in medicine.

Existing research evaluating unconscious bias within the broader international medical workforce reveal gender inequities impacting women within medical institutions include compensation, career progression, research publishing, recognition and recruitment. Moreover, that this phenomenon is even more apparent at academic medicine level.

“Acknowledging research by our international colleagues, our hypothesis is that medical staff at St Vincent’s have been and/or may be exposed to gender bias in its many and varied forms in the course of their employment.” Said A/Professor Nada Hamad, Haematologist and Chair of the Women in Medicine committee.

This led to a Campus-wide internal evaluation of institutional gender bias with a focus on identifying what disparities may exist and how they may be impacting our medical workforce as a whole.

By identifying medical workforce and leadership gender patterns to assess any ‘micro inequities’ whereby staff may be overlooked for opportunities and benefits based on their gender.

“When organisations base their assessment of medical staff on merit or achievement alone, this inherently disadvantages women at each stage of their professional life from recruitment, evaluation, promotion, training and compensation” explains A/Professor Hamad.

“For female doctors, starting a family comes with real risk that you’ll fall behind your male peers in terms of opportunity for further studies and career progression, and too often women in medicine are completely overlooked in favour of men who generally have less interruption throughout their academic and professional lives”, explained A/Professor Hamad.

In order to really drive the establishment of a new vision and organisational strategy for gender equality, the Women in Medicine committee has been joined by Dr Ling-Ling Tsai to lead the research project on Campus. Dr Tsai is developing a comprehensive set of metrics and longitudinal data analyses to establish an evidence base, from which to draw conclusions, develop interventions and drive organisational change.

“This is the first Australian study of its kind we will be leading St Vincent’s toward being outliers when it comes to gender equity in medicine, and improving our status as an employer of choice for women” Dr Tsai said.

The research project: A Healthcare Campus Gender Equity & Diversity in Medicine Inventory, will encompass St Vincent’s Hospital, St Vincent’s Private Hospital, The Kinghorn Cancer Centre, the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, St Vincent’s Clinical School, UNDA Clinical School and the St Vincent’s Curran Foundation.

To learn more about this study, contact Dr Ling-Ling Tsai at lingling.tsai@svha.org.au

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A/Prof Nada Hamad

Photo courtesy of Vogue Magazine