Advancing equality for women in medicine has been a staple in Dr. Jennifer Grandis's career at Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF OHNS). A recent article in Cancer Cell by Dr. Grandis, "Career Trajectories of MD-PhD Physician Scientists: The Loss of Women Investigators," commentated on the gender disparities in academic medicine.
Dr. Grandis, along with her esteemed collaborators, OHNS's Drs. Richard Steinman, Lisa Gandy, Elana Fertig, Amanda Blackford and Ms. Hanfei Qi, comment on the systematic changes that would better sustain equality efforts.
"Poorly defined and inconsistently executed promotion, tenure, and dissemination of start-up funding and space risk gender bias to impact these decisions, impeding women's advancement," Dr. Grandis and the remaining authors write.
"Even while women MD-PhD trainees are as successful as their male counterparts in securing funding as trainees and junior faculty, they are missing from the ranks of NIH-funded established investigators," the authors write. "Women physician scientists are disproportionately leaving the investigator track… The consequences of this loss of talent are likely substantial. The drive to gender equity is taking too long. It is time for institutions and the biomedical enterprise to put octane in the tank," Dr. Grandis and the contributors write in a compelling conclusion.
Dr. Grandis's research has received great acclaim, earning an impact factor of 50.3! Other researchers have frequently cited the article, contributing to the strong impact factor score.
