Implicit Gender and Maternal Bias in Medicine
Implicit Bias [1]
Implicit gender bias also plays a role in the gender disparity in leadership positions in medicine. This plays a bigger role in leadership in medicine than most people would think, it affects the hiring process that women go through, their promotions, and their well-being. This is very evident in academic medicine and can affect the researchers' funding and sponsorships for their research. According to an article in the Harvard Business Review, they point out that there is maternal bias in the medical workplace and it is referred to as the “maternal wall”. It describes the wall the women hit in the workplace after having a child, specifically in the. Furthermore, mothers are not being accommodated for this in the workplace, and there are no programs or policies that encourage keeping a career and being a mother [2]. In an article written for the Journal of Academic Medicine, in an interview with women who left their research early, they noted that they lacked roles models that combined career and family responsibility which caused a frustrating work-life balance and they felt that there was a biased favor towards their male colleagues [3]. This experience can be backed up by the fact that in 2014 an AAMC report found that only 5% of full-time faculty at professorship level are women which is 4 times less than men. This further emphasizes the point of implicit bias that favors men more than women especially in academic medicine[4]. These implicit biases are even worse for women of color as they typically have to deal with not only gender and maternal implicit bias, but racial bias as well [5].
[1] Quinlan, Casey 2019. “Bias in Medicine - an Untreated Epidemic - Patient Empowerment Network.” Patient Empowerment Network. August 23, 2019. https://powerfulpatients.org/2019/08/23/bias-in-medicine/.
[2] “What’s Holding Women in Medicine Back from Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, June
19, 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/06/whats-holding-women-in-medicine-back-from-leadership.
[3] Rochon, Paula A., Frank Davidoff, and Wendy Levinson. “Women in Academic Medicine
Leadership." Academic Medicine 91, no. 8 (August 2016): 1053–56. https://doi.org/10.1097/acm.0000000000001281.
[4] Rochon, "Women Academic Medicine", 1053-56
[5] Bhatt, Wasudha. “THE LITTLE BROWN WOMAN: Gender Discrimination in American
Medicine." Gender and Society 27, no. 5 (2013): 659–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43669822.