AAIM PerspectivesGender Differences in Salary of Internal Medicine Residency Directors: A National Survey
Section snippets
Data Collection
The Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM) administers an annual survey of Internal Medicine program directors, the goal of which is to develop a longitudinal database for GME. Data are used to shape organizational policies and initiatives, and inform APDIM membership of topics important to residency programs.13
For the 2012 survey, e-mail notifications with program-specific hyperlinks to a Web-based questionnaire were sent in August 2012 to program directors and program
Results
Of 370 programs, 241 (65.1%) completed all the survey questions we assessed, of whom 169 (70.1%) were men and 72 (29.9%) were women. There were no significant differences between responders and nonresponders for program description, geographic region represented, board certification rate, program director tenure, or program size (all P > .01). The response rates for surveys administered since 2008 ranged from 65.9% to 71.9%.
The characteristics of program directors by gender are shown in Table.
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate gender disparity in salary for Internal Medicine residency program directors. The disparity exists regardless of region, program type, academic rank, General Internal Medicine specialty, age, or years of experience. In addition, we found that the gap in salary has not narrowed over the past 5 years. Our study findings are similar to recent findings of salary differences for female physician researchers,21 and we extend the scope of the
Conclusions
There is much to learn about women program directors as important leaders in medical education. Leaders in academic medicine centers, residency and fellowship directors, and all faculty in medical education need to be aware that the salary disparities cited decades ago still persist in this important population of medical educators. Reporting this information is an important step in addressing the disparity in an effort to improve it. Sponsorship of women without awareness of, and subsequent
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the program directors who completed the surveys and the Mayo Clinic Survey Research Center for their assistance with survey administration.
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2021, Academic RadiologyCitation Excerpt :The mean tenure of radiology PDs has been reported in literature to be 6.9 ± 6.7 years in 2013 (16), which is slightly longer than average tenure in our study (5.26 years), which may imply PD terms getting shorter with time, although the prior study was based on a survey with only 60% of PD's responding and therefore this comparison should be interpreted with caution. Women comprise 29.4% of the PDs, which is comparable to the proportion of female PDs in other medical specialties such as surgery (29.8%), internal medicine (29.9%), and ophthalmology (28%) (17–19), but higher than specialties such as interventional neuroradiology (7%) (20). This is also higher than the proportion of practicing female radiology (25.3%) (21) and comparable with the proportion of women in academic radiology, reported as 29.2% of all academic radiologists (22).
Funding: This study was supported in part by the Mayo Clinic Internal Medicine Residency Office of Educational Innovations as part of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Educational Innovations Project.
Conflict of Interest: None.
Authorship: All authors had access to the data and played a role in writing this manuscript.