In the October/November 2018 issue, we profile The Big Bang Theory actress Mayim Bialik, who has a PhD in neuroscience, and wants to encourage more girls to pursue a career in the sciences. In this online exclusive, we look at the gender inequities in science and neuroscience.
Had Mayim Bialik pursued a professorship in neuroscience after completing her PhD in that area, she would have become a member of a club in which women still haven’t reached parity with men.
In a study published online in JAMA Neurology in April 2018, researchers found that women were still underrepresented in academic neurology with 30.8 percent women and 69.2 percent men, a disparity that increased with advancing rank. At the professor level, 86.2 percent of professors were men. Only 13.8 percent were women. In addition, fewer female academic neurologists are published compared to men.
The same study showed that male lecturers published almost twice as frequently as their female counterparts. The gap decreased with advancing rank. The publication rate for male and female professors was 10.5 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively.
A 35-year analysis of publication rates of male and female neurologists published in Neurology in 2018, revealed a significant increase in female authorship over the time span, but also a persistent sex gap. In Neurology, JAMA Neurology, and Annals of Internal Medicine as of 2015, female authors publishing for the first time represented 25, 22, and 30 percent, respectively. For senior female authors, the numbers were lower at 17, 19, and 19 percent, respectively.
A September 2016 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that female physicians in academic medicine earned about $20,000 less than their male colleagues, and women neurologists made $40,000 less than their male counterparts in academic medicine.
Only 19 percent of full professors and 12 percent of department chairs are women, according to 2015 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. However, 48 percent of neurology residents are women, and 54 percent of faculty at the instructor level are women. What is also striking is that only 16 percent of deans were women yet 27 percent of interim deans and 46 percent of assistant deans were women, according to the 2015 data.
“This suggests that the women are good enough for the support roles for the deans or the temporary dean roles, but they are not getting the permanent senior or leadership roles,” says Karen C. Johnston, MD, MSC, professor and chair of neurology and public health sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and president of the Association of University Professors of Neurology. “We have been saying for 20 years that this is a pipeline issue. It is very clear now that women make up about half of the neurology workforce and yet are leaking out of the pipe prior to making it to the highest ranks. Since 2000, women have comprised about half of our medical students, and in 20 years they are still not moving up the ranks the way men are. We know it is not a pipeline issue.”
In February 2016, Bibiana Bielekova, MD, FAAN, current chief of the Neuroimmunological Diseases Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID) in Washington, DC, filed an equal employment opportunity complaint at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after she was denied tenure.
As part of her complaint, she compiled a graph that showed that tenure for women at the NIH improved by only 1 percent over 25 years. “At that rate, it’s going to take another 300 years to reach parity,” she says. Dr. Bielekova settled the complaint and was allowed to go through the tenure process. After a unanimous vote, she was granted tenure and subsequently moved to the NIAID.
“We can’t fight alone,” Dr. Bielekova says. “We have to unite as women. We have to be able to support each other in an open way. We can’t expect that men are going to make a just society for us. We must take courage from each other and provide companionship and support for each other.”
Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, FAAN, chair of the department of neurology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston Salem, NC, is doing just that. In 2005, when she became chair of the department, there were no women associate professors and no women professors in the department of neurology at Wake Forest; she was the only female department chair.
Under her tenure, an equal number of women and men are now full professors, including three tenured women in her department. And she’s not done yet. “You need to have an adequate pool so you are giving women and minorities opportunities,” says Dr. Brashear. “Despite a national increase in the number of women professors in all academic medical centers, only 19 percent are women. We need to work together as a community to bring women and minorities forward as leaders. We have to be very purposeful. Our patients want the medical community to look like the patient community.”