Future directions include preceding and following the IAT with more robust reflection and education on unconscious bias. The authors join others in calling for an examination of bias at all levels of academic medicine.
The relative lack of diversity in medicine is a rate limiting factor in efforts to eliminate health care disparities. Many medical schools struggle to matriculate student bodies that reflect the diversity of this country. Actively recruiting is one tactic to diversify a medical school's applicant pool, but in isolation is not enough. Our medical school admissions committee made a number of programmatic changes that contributed to our current compositional diversity that may be instructive to others. This report from the field on the experience of one U.S. medical school describes several admissions committee initiatives that can be undertaken to increase the yield of students from groups underrepresented in medicine who matriculate to medical school.
Purpose
The authors sought to identify variables independently associated with full-time faculty appointment among recent medical graduates.
Method
With institutional review board approval, the authors developed a database of individualized records for six midwestern medical schools’ 1997–2002 graduates. Using multivariate logistic regression, they identified variables independently associated with full-time faculty appointment from among demographic, medical-school-related, and career-intention variables. They report adjusted odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI).
Results
Of 1,965 graduates in the sample, 263 (13.4%) held full-time faculty appointments in 2007–2008, including 14.4% (123/853) of women graduates and 8.6% (17/198) of underrepresented minority (URM) graduates. Women (OR: 1.386, 95% CI: 1.023–1.878), MD/PhD program graduates (OR: 2.331, 95% CI: 1.160–4.683), and graduates who reported a career-setting preference for “full-time university faculty” on the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Graduation Questionnaire (OR: 3.164, 95% CI: 2.231–4.486) were more likely to have a full-time faculty appointment. Graduates who chose family medicine (OR: 0.433, 95% CI: 0.231–0.811) and surgical specialties (OR: 0.497, 95% CI: 0.249–0.994) were less likely to have a full-time faculty appointment. URM race/ethnicity was not independently associated with full-time faculty appointment (OR: 0.788; 95% CI: 0.452–1.375).
Conclusions
Efforts to increase representation of women graduates in academic medicine seem to have met with greater success than efforts to increase representation of URM graduates. Greater participation of URM students in MD/PhD programs and in interventions during medical school that promote interest in academic-medicine careers may increase URM graduates’ representation in academic medicine.
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