Lancet
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In August 2018, the president of the World Bank noted that "'Human capital'-the potential of individuals-is going to be the most important long-term investment any country can make for its people's future prosperity and quality of life". Nevertheless, leaders and practitioners in academic science and medicine continue to be unaware of and poorly educated about the nature, extent, and impact of barriers to full participation of women and minorities in science and medicine around the world. This lack of awareness and education results in failures to fully mobilise the human capital of half the population and limits global technological and medical advancements. ⋯ We survey approaches and insights that have helped to identify and remove systemic bias and barriers in science and medicine, and propose tools that will help organisational change toward gender equality. We describe tools that include formal legislation and mandated quotas at national or large-scale levels (eg, gender parity), techniques that increase fairness (eg, gender equity) through facilitated organisational cultural change at institutional levels, and professional development of core competencies at individual levels. This Review is not intended to be an extensive analysis of all the literature currently available on achieving gender equality in academic medicine and science, but rather, a reflection on finding multifactorial solutions.
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Women's representation in science and medicine has slowly increased over the past few decades. However, this rise in numbers of women, or gender diversity, has not been matched by a rise in gender inclusion. ⋯ This Review draws on several decades of research in the field of management and its cognate disciplines to identify five myths that continue to perpetuate gender bias and five strategies for improving not only the number of women in medicine, but also their lived experiences, capacity to aspire, and opportunity to succeed. We argue for a move away from a singular focus on interventions aimed at targeting individual attitudes and behaviour to more comprehensive interventions that address structural and systemic changes.
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Clinical and preclinical studies have shown that there are sex-based differences at the genetic, cellular, biochemical, and physiological levels. Despite this, numerous studies have shown poor levels of inclusion of female populations into medical research. These disparities in sex inclusion in research are further complicated by the absence of sufficient reporting and analysis by sex of study populations. Disparities in the inclusion of the sexes in medical research substantially reduce the utility of the results of such research for the entire population. The absence of sex-related reporting are problematical for the translation of research from the preclinical to clinical and applied health settings. Large-scale studies are needed to identify the extent of sex-related reporting and where disparities are more prevalent. In addition, while several studies have shown the dearth of female researchers in science, few have evaluated whether a scarcity of women in science might be related to disparities in sex inclusion and reporting. We aimed to do a cross-disciplinary analysis of the degree of sex-related reporting across the health sciences-from biomedical, to clinical, and public health research-and the role of author gender in sex-related reporting. ⋯ Canada Research Chairs.
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Improving the career progression of women and ethnic minorities in public health universities has been a longstanding challenge, which we believe might be addressed by including staff diversity data in university rankings. We present findings from a mixed methods investigation of gender-related and ethnicity-related differences in career progression at the 15 highest ranked social sciences and public health universities in the world, including an analysis of the intersection between sex and ethnicity. ⋯ In all universities, representation of women declined between middle and senior academic levels, despite women outnumbering men at the junior level. Ethnic-minority women might have a magnified disadvantage because ethnic-minority academics constitute a small proportion of junior-level positions and the proportion of ethnic-minority women declines along the seniority pathway.
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Across countries and disciplines, studies show male researchers receive more research funding than their female peers. Because most studies have been observational, it is unclear whether imbalances stem from evaluations of female research investigators or of their proposed research. In 2014, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research created a natural experiment by dividing investigator-initiated funding applications into two new grant programmes: one with and one without an explicit review focus on the calibre of the principal investigator. ⋯ None.