Representation of Women and Underrepresented Groups in US Academic Medicine by Specialty

This cross-sectional study compares trends in representation of women and underrepresented groups in medicine in US academic medicine by specialty.

available online or upon request from the respective data sources. Given that data used in the study are deidentified and aggregated on the national level, the University of Rochester Medical Center Research Subjects Review Board deemed the study exempt from federal regulations for the protection of human research participants.

Data Source
The AAMC initiated the Faculty Roster in 1966 to support national policy studies by collecting comprehensive information on the characteristics of academic faculty members at LCME accredited US medical schools. The AAMC Faculty Roster is available as aggregate data from all accredited US MD-granting medical schools on all full-time faculty as of December 31st in each respective year of the data stratified by sex, race/ethnicity, and department classification. The Faculty Roster utilizes the official name given to each department by each medical school. This study included n=16  The ACGME Data Resource Book is collected from the Accreditation Data System, a web-based software system collected on the program level. The Data Resource Book contains the most recent data on ACGME accredited institutions and programs and represents a cross-section as of June 30th in the respective year of the data (i.e., 2012-2013). The ACGME report specialty and subspecialty by year. ACGME classified specialties were matched to included AAMC reported departments.
Subspecialties (e.g., Child Neurology) and departments not reported in the AAMC Faculty Roster (e.g., Radiation Oncology) were excluded from the analysis. The included specialties represent n=89,414 residents in the 2012-2013 academic year.
All data were received from the data source in nationally aggregated data stratified by sex, race/ethnicity, and academic department or specialty and are publicly available online, or upon request.  reports. 3 Where comparisons were made to the resident population, URM was collectively defined as Black, Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaskan Native, with the exclusion of mixed race categories, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander due to the limited reporting of corresponding resident race/ethnicity in the ACGME Data Resource Book; however, these groups comprised ~3% of faculty data.

Outcomes
This study examines trends in the percentage of URM and women within clinical academic faculty stratified by specialty from 1990 to 2019.
The study also examines sex and race/ethnicity representation within academic faculty compared to the pool of available residents. The metric used is referred to as the "representation ratio". 4

Limitations
There are several limitations to the study. The interpretation of the representation ratio in this study is limited by the inability to control for trainee preferences regarding academic positions and does not account for personal and structural factors that may influence career choice. Furthermore, the study used nationally aggregated deidentified data which restricts the granularity of the analysis and prohibits control of potentially confounding factors such as geographic location, regional demographics, and status of Historically Black Colleges and Universitieswhich tend toward greater diversity. Furthermore, due to differences in reporting of race/ethnicity and department classification between the AAMC Faculty Roster and ACGME Data Resource Book comparisons between faculty and resident populations may be imperfect. This study is also restricted to MD-granting (allopathic) institutions by nature of the data source and does not represent the academic faculty population for Osteopathic medical schools.
Further study of individualized faculty and institutional data with appropriate control of regional demographics is needed.