Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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A scarcity of women in leadership positions in academic medicine has persisted despite their increasing numbers in medical training. To understand the barriers confronting women and potential remedies, clinical department chairs with extensive leadership experience were interviewed. ⋯ The chairs universally acknowledged the existence of barriers to the advancement of women and proposed a spectrum of approaches to address them. Individual interventions, while adapting faculty to requirements, also tend to preserve existing institutional arrangements, including those that may have adverse effects on all faculty. Departmental or school-level changes address these shortcomings and have a greater likelihood of achieving enduring impact.