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Gender Distribution in Academic Hand Surgery: Orthopedic and Plastic Hand Fellowship Faculty.
Katherine Grunzweig, DeAsia Jacob, Corinne Wee, Wendy Chen, Debra Bourne
Case Western/University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center
2021-01-31
Presenter: Katherine Grunzweig
Affidavit:
Katherine Grunzweig developed and carried out the project, and the entire project represents her original work with assistance in statistics, data collection, and some refinement of concepts by the other authors.
Director Name: Edward Davidson
Author Category: Resident Plastic Surgery
Presentation Category: Clinical
Abstract Category: Hand
Background: Focus on diversity and inclusion in medicine has shown a spotlight on the lack of gender diversity in faculty and academic positions in surgical subspecialties. Our aim was to understand gender distributions within academic hand surgery faculty.
Methods: Using the American Society for Surgery of the Hand (ASSH) fellowship database, all fellowship department pages were reviewed for faculty gender distribution. Academic programs that separately listed plastics and orthopedic positions were assessed for any crossover faculty but documented as separate programs in the data set. Binomial distribution tests were run on the resulting data.
Results: Of 90 programs, 89 were analyzed. Seven were identified as orthopedic only programs based on the ASSH website. There were 606 faculty listed on program websites/ASSH program snapshots. Of this faculty, 15.5% (94) were female (P-value = 7.45e-71, highly significant); 71.2% were orthopedic-trained, 30.8% were plastics-trained. The proportion of women faculty in orthopedic-only programs is half that of mixed programs but statistical significance was not reached (P-value = 0.337). Fellows for 2019-2020 were 26.5% (49) female, 40 (26%) were orthopedic-trained and 8 (34.8%) were plastics-trained. There were a greater proportion of female fellows in 2019-2020 compared to faculty (P-value = 0.001).
Conclusion: Female hand surgeons are significantly under-represented in academic hand surgery faculty positions. The number of orthopedic-trained female hand surgeons outnumbers plastics-trained hand surgeons. An increasing proportion of female surgeons are entering into hand fellowship, and this has important implications regarding the evolving demographics of academic hand surgery.
