AAMC Reporter: September 2009

New AAMC Groups Will Focus on Diversity

Two new AAMC professional groups and a new committee have been created to help support diversity across academic medicine.

The Group on Diversity and Inclusion (GDI) and Group on Women in Medicine and Science (GWIMS) are the association's newest professional development groups and bring the AAMC's total number of such groups to 16. The Committee on Diversity Affairs (CODA) is a subset of the AAMC's existing Group on Student Affairs and replaces the group's Minority Affairs Section. All three entities began their work in July.

"It's been a long time coming," said Renee Navarro, M.D., Pharm.D., GWIMS chair and associate dean of academic affairs at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. "To be supported like this gives us reason to celebrate."

Although the face of the nation is literally changing as it becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, the U.S. physician and medical student populations have struggled to keep pace. Some ethnic groups including Latinos have recently enjoyed a swell in their medical student ranks, but the gains still do not match their growth in the general population—a disparity that can lead to problems with health care access and delivery. Women now account for nearly half of all medical school applicants, but AAMC statistics show that, from 1981 to 1997, 43 percent of women left academic medicine compared with 37 percent of men. A 2006 Institute of Medicine report found that women researchers still face discrimination and receive less pay and fewer honors and advancement opportunities than male counterparts.

Leaders from the three new entities have said they will work together to find leverage points to increase diversity, but added that a diverse medical student—and, ultimately, physician—population can have many definitions beyond race or ethnicity.

"Diversity is about more than increasing numbers," said Karen A. Lewis, CODA chair and assistant vice president for enrollment management at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn. "It benefits all students to have a diverse background in education and have more representation in the workforce. It's through experience and interaction that you get an expanded awareness of people of different backgrounds, be it race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disabilities, or other factors. You can't just put all that in a textbook." CODA will focus largely on issues directly facing current and prospective medical students, while GDI will address diversity across the medical education continuum, including in faculty development and graduate medical education (GME), that have traditionally received relatively little attention.

"For a long time, the focus has been on the front end of medical education: recruiting, admissions, financial aid, and retention," said GDI Chair Cynthia E. Boyd, M.D., associate vice president and chief compliance officer at Rush Medical College of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "There has been a drop-off in focus on GME and faculty and administrative affairs."

Initiatives to increase minority interest in medical school faculty positions are in the works.

"There is a paucity of diversity in the leaders and innovators among our faculty and our administrators," Boyd said. "Students, whether they are women or from underrepresented minority groups, have said to me that they don't see themselves in the continuum."

According to Lily May Johnson, CODA secretary and AAMC manager of constituent diversity services, CODA will also focus on K-12, college students, and others by working with pre-health advisors and facilitating regional health career fairs, among other things. In general, the committee is designed, Johnson said, to act as a central resource and weigh station for a variety of student outreach efforts. Each medical school dean has been asked to designate an individual responsible for student affairsrelated diversity issues.

"We want to be the hub of student diversity," Johnson said. "How do we work with our partner organizations, district superintendents, the schools? It is a long litany of things."

According to Boyd, diversity efforts have come a long way in medical education, but are by no means complete. "Some are in the beginning of this process, some are in the middle, and some aren't doing it at all," she said. "We have to go out and make the case that diversity should be a part of every conversation, and is not an end point but a means to an end."

Leaders of the Group on Women and Medicine in Science, which previously operated at the AAMC as an informal network known as Women in Medicine, said a more official structure was necessary to increase the attention paid to women's issues in academic medicine.

"Science is a new component here and it's an area we've never addressed in terms of specifically women in academic medicine careers," said Valarie Clark, AAMC's director of faculty development. "We want to know, how do we support and sustain researchers?"

According to Clark, the new GWIMS structure, which like the other groups has asked medical school deans and teaching hospital CEOs to appoint a group representative from the faculty, would bring women's issues, such as leadership development and retention, more to the forefront of discourse in academic medicine. GWIMS Chair Navarro said the group will be effective because its membership still work in academic medicine.

"We are in a unique position because we are the people living these lives," Navarro said. "We know what the barriers and challenges are. This is about having that sense of community, and the information we share can be helpful to us as individuals and to our campuses."

—By Scott Harris

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