Evaluating the Women's Empowerment and Leadership Initiative: Supporting mentorship, career satisfaction, and well‐being among pediatric anesthesiologists

Abstract

The Society for Pediatric Anesthesia launched the Women's Empowerment and Leadership Initiative (WELI) in 2018 to empower highly productive women pediatric anesthesiologists to achieve equity, promotion, and leadership. WELI is focused on six career development domains: promotion and leadership, networking, conceptualization and completion of projects, mentoring, career satisfaction, and sense of well-being. We sought feedback about whether WELI supported members' career development by surveys emailed in November 2020 (baseline), May 2021 (6 months), and January 2022 (14 months). Program feedback was quantitatively evaluated by the Likert scale questions and qualitatively evaluated by extracting themes from free-text question responses. The response rates were 60.5% (92 of 152) for the baseline, 51%(82 of 161) for the 6-month, and 52% (96 of 185) for the 14-month surveys. Five main themes were identified from the free-text responses in the 6-and 14-month surveys.

Staying Virtual: A Survey Study of the Virtual Lecture Experience in Academic Medicine

“…One author selected quotes to illustrate the themes from a wide variety of respondents, and the selected quotes were agreed upon by the other authors. [9][10][11][12][13] May 2024 • Volume 138 • Number 5 www.anesthesia-analgesia.org 1023…”

“…One author selected quotes to illustrate the themes from a wide variety of respondents, and the selected quotes were agreed upon by the other authors. 9–13…”

The Women in Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology Special Interest Group: What Can the Lessons of One Anesthesiology Affinity Group Tell Us About How to Build Impactful Professional Communities?

“…8,9 Before 2018, there had been only 2 female presidents of the SCA, and there were noted disparities in committee chairs and speakers at the annual meeting. 10 When women came together in 2018 to establish WICTA, the climate of frustration with the persistent disparities in anesthesiology had already spurred the formation of women's interest groups in the American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA), pediatric anesthesiology, 11,12 regional anesthesiology, and pain medicine. Nationally, gender issues were receiving renewed and broad attention.…”

Should we change women to become leaders or should we change leadership for everyone?

“…The Women's Empowerment and Leadership Initiative (WELI) 1 was launched in 2018, in part to address the fact that although women account for almost half of medical graduates, only 25% of professors and 18% of academic department chairs in the United States are women, 2 and even fewer within anesthesiology, at 18% and 13%, respectively 2 . Women are also under‐represented as authors 3 .…”

“…The WELI program is an admirable initiative designed to facilitate women in achieving academic leadership but while WELI has been shown to facilitate meaningful networking and improve participants' interest and the ability to mentor others, 1 tangible benefits such as improving access to grants and promotions are yet to be seen. Perhaps it is too soon for these measurable effects to be realized.…”