Women in Medicine Strives for Gender Equity in Clinician Workforce
Non-profit Women in Medicine offers a speaker’s bureau and allyship training as it sets its sights on gender equity in the clinician workforce and healthcare field.
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By Sara Heath
- Healthcare is staring down a clinician workforce and staffing crisis, a problem only exacerbated by its own gender equity issues. Prominently, women are leaving the medical workforce in droves, but Shikha Jain, MD, and Eve Bloomgarden, MD, are looking to change that.
“Aside from pay, we know that there's a lot of implicit and explicit bias that feeds into the fact that oftentimes women are not nominated for awards or selected for opportunities as often. Not because women aren't qualified or ambitious, but because they are just not being chosen for a variety of reasons,” Jain, a hematologist and oncologist at UIC Cancer Center and the founder of WIM, said in a recent episode of the Healthcare Strategies podcast.
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“Basically, in every aspect of careers, transitioning into leadership positions, being promoted, there were very large disparities that existed in the healthcare space for men and women.”
Jain and Bloomgarden lead a group called Women in Medicine (WIM) which seeks to promote gender equity in healthcare by providing the tools for organizational leadership. Through WIM’s annual summit, speaker’s bureau, and allyship training for men, the organization works to ensure that women and other gender-fluid people get the same opportunities in medicine.
“The purpose of our organization is to close the gender gap in medicine and healthcare, but we do that in a variety of different ways that bring all players to the table and really make it a team effort,” said Bloomgarden, an endocrinologist and chief development officer for WIM. “It's not just about wanting to say that, ‘hey, we're here and we want to be acknowledged for that,’ but it's really the best thing for everyone.”
As the medical industry acknowledges the importance of a diverse medical workforce—diverse in terms of race, socioeconomic status, and yes, of gender and gender diversity—Jain and Bloomgarden aim for equity across all providers. By assuring women an equitable role in the industry, the WIM leaders said stronger medical breakthroughs and patient experiences are on the horizon.
