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 For instance, female heart doctors are less likely to report career
advancement and more likely to report discrimination in the
workplace.
Women account for only about 13 percent of cardiologists, compared
to 18 percent of surgeons, 30 percent of oncologists and
hematologists, 35 percent of internists and 50 percent of
obstetricians and gynecologists.
“We already know that cardiology is a field that not enough women
enter,” said senior study author Claire Duvernoy of the University
of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. Duvernoy chairs the American
College of Cardiology Women in Cardiology Council, which has
conducted the survey every 10 years since 1996.
“We found that many differences between men and women continue and
have not really gone away to any substantial degree,” she told
Reuters Health. “If there’s still a perception that having both a
career in cardiology and a family is hard for women, we need to find
ways to change that.”
The cardiologists who completed the survey - 964 women and 1,349 men
- answered questions about demographics, career choices, career
satisfaction, and professional and personal barriers to success.
Overall, 88 percent of women and 90 percent of men reported moderate
to high satisfaction. Similarly, about 60 percent of both men and
women were satisfied with their financial compensation.
In the past 20 years, the researchers note, the percentage of women
reporting discrimination has dropped from 71 percent to 65 percent.
Still, however, women are less likely to report advancement compared
to their peers. Almost two-thirds of the women reported workplace
discrimination, which is three times more than men and more likely
due to gender and parenting. Men were more likely to report racial
and religious discrimination.
Women are still less likely to marry and have children than men and
more likely to require childcare help and interrupt their medical
training, typically for childbirth, the survey showed.
“The (American College of Cardiology) as a whole is having a
conversation now about ways to make this career more attractive,”
Duvernoy said. “The conversation needs to be had about how to level
the playing field.”
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Although women are still more likely to say family duties hinder
their professional work, the survey showed a substantial shift in
how men experience family responsibilities. Compared to 20 years
ago, they are more likely now to say family negatively affects their
careers, which could mean they’re taking on more family duties, the
study authors wrote in the Journal of the Amerian College of
Cardiology.
“Our workforce is aging, and if we don’t increase the breadth of our
pool, we’re not going to fill that demand,” Duvernoy said. “We need
more women and underrepresented minorities to take care of the
growing number of patients with heart disease in the next 10-20
years.”
As for why non-doctors should care about these issues, “Personal
lives spill over into the type of care provided,” said Anupam Jena,
a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with
this research. In a study released in mid-December, Jena and
colleagues found that patients treated by female doctors have better
health outcomes than male doctors.
“If women have better patient outcomes but are paid less and
discriminated against more, what does that say about the efficiency
of our physician workforce?” he told Reuters Health. “We should be
giving incentives to encourage women to enter cardiology, and we
aren’t doing so.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2hREpaO Journal of the American College of
Cardiology, online December 21, 2016.
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