Dean’s Column

In 2011, Jefferson celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first women accepted to our medical college. We commemorated the milestone with a year’s worth of special programming and, in the process, highlighted eight women trailblazers of that inaugural Class of 1965. Yet, amidst all the showcasing, we did not sugar-coat some countervailing realities. Our medical college was late in admitting women, and by all accounts, it was not a walk in the park for our female medical students in those early years. Yet, those pioneers persevered, and realized their dream of becoming doctors, thereby ushering Jefferson into the modern era.

Fast forward to 2021. Half of each class at our medical college, and sometimes more, are women. And they stand out across all dimensions, including the curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular realms.

Back in 2011, I took steps to ensure we were cultivating future medical leaders by establishing the dean’s Student Leadership Forum (SLF). I meet with each incoming cohort early in their second year—at first monthly and then periodically across the remainder of their time with us—delving into a range of topics tied to leadership. The students also meet with other Jefferson leaders, and participate in special programming. The selection process is rigorous; applicants are carefully vetted and whittled from about 80 to the final 18. Remarkably, year-after-year, there is a gender imbalance in those making it through the gauntlet, with women students predominating each SLF cohort. This is a testament to the caliber of women training in medicine at our medical college these days.

Our women students stand out in so many arenas: residency match; Medicine+ co-curricular venues such as JeffDesign; community outreach programs such as JeffHope; musical forums within our new Medicine + Music framework; and many more. And it is not just our medical students. Women figure prominently in the ranks of our medical college deans, in those driving our highly successful JeffMD undergraduate medical education curriculum as track and course leaders, and our biomedical research braintrust, to name a few.

Over the intervening decade since the semi-centenary year, we have addressed certain gender inequities and disconnects. Perhaps most visibly has been in the area of faculty compensation. Under the leadership of Karen Novielli, MD, SKMC’s vice dean for Faculty Affairs and Professional Development, we rolled out a comprehensive clinical faculty compensation program, a productivity-and-incentive-based plan that is formulaic to maximize fairness and transparency. There has also been a push over this past decade to recruit even more women faculty, to provide proper mentoring, and to bring women into leadership roles at departmental and divisional levels.

Yet, despite these efforts, significant challenges persist for women in medicine in general, and here at Jefferson as well. In 2011, early into my deanship, I stated that “the situation requires more than a bandage; it requires systemic change.” Interestingly, in my column of the Bulletin that year, I wrote that medical schools need to start asking the hard questions: Can we add flexibility; how can we diversify training experiences; why do we put deadlines on tenure tracks? How can we be better at attracting the best and brightest women into the field of medicine, and ensuring roadblocks to success have been removed?

Career progression, and placing women in top leadership roles, remains a challenge. In 2019, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, women physicians across the country held approximately 25 percent of full professorships, and about 16 percent of clinical sciences department chairs, numbers that track at Jefferson. Although our decade-long push to cultivate women medical leaders through programming such as SLF and faculty mentoring has set us in the right direction, real change demands systemic re-engineering. While some remedies can be local, real change demands changes at the national level.

In 2011, I stated that “we can work to devise a system in the future that allows both men and women to pursue academic medicine without sacrificing their personal lives.” We have clearly taken steps in that direction. But we must do more. We have to continue to find ways of making the path for women to becoming physicians as clear as it is for men.

At invited talks to other institutions, I have spoken of reimagining the 21st century physician. One way to do that is through diversification of career paths enabled by a medical training. In the face of inevitable disruption by machine intelligence and robotics, as well as the expansion of clinical practice by non-physician providers, the role of the physician will per force morph—in many ways for the better. Physician roles will diversify and proliferate, and in so doing, make room for more diverse entrants to the medical realm. This diversification of paths and opportunities, and celebration of diversity, will undoubtedly benefit women physicians.

Back in 2011, I shared that two of my daughters were medical school students themselves. One went on to train in pediatric rheumatology and integrative medicine. The other has leveraged her medical training in the realm of high finance—exemplifying the very career diversification I just spoke of. Should any of my granddaughters choose a medical career, they will be standing on the shoulders of parental role models, and the pioneering women physicians who came before them. We must ensure an open pathway to their success.’’

Mark L. Tykocinski, MD
President, Thomas Jefferson University
Anthony F. and Gertrude M. DePalma Dean,
Sidney Kimmel Medical College