Presenter: Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, CEW+ 2020 Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity & Social Change Award Winner

This session will provide an overview of the presenter’s journey to study the promotion of gender equity in medicine. Dr. Reshma Jagsi will discuss in detail the evidence that her research team and others have gathered to demonstrate the impact of the differential challenges that women in medicine face (unconscious biases, gendered expectations of society, and overt discrimination and harassment) and their evidence-based recommendations regarding: 

1. how advocacy can lead both to the development of beneficial pipeline programs and policies governing work-life integration;
2. the cultural transformation efforts of national organizations (like AAMC, NIH, the National Academies, and TIME’S UP Healthcare) to promote gender equity and discourage sexual harassment; and
3. using social media to build communities where individuals might once have been isolated as “the only” one of their demographic characteristics before. 

Following this, Dr. Jagsi will moderate a panel of four esteemed colleagues from the medical school, Dr. Dana Telem, Dr. Eve Kerr, Dr. Jack Iwashyna, and Dr. Timothy Johnson. They will have an interactive discussion of insights that can be applied from their experiences in medicine to inform efforts to promote equity in the professions more generally.

Format:

An important starting point within this workshop will be an examination of our own culture and identity journey, utilizing Milner’s (2010) Culture of Power framework to engage participants in small group discussion before larger themes are brought back to the larger group – issues related to educational disparities that originate within society when students are young, yet lead into many of the inequities that are still highly visible within higher education.

In addition, an integral part of the Inspire initiative is pairing advocacy, social change, and activism with skills that enhance a sense of wellbeing, focus and interconnectedness. A short guided Mindfulness Meditation practice will be incorporated into the program.

Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil., is the Newman Family Professor and Deputy Chair in the Department of Radiation Oncology and director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan. An internationally recognized clinical trialist and health services researcher in the field of breast cancer, Dr. Jagsi has co-authored over 300 publications. She has also devoted a substantial portion of her service to the institution and her scholarly effort to promoting gender equity in academic medicine. She is a frequently invited lecturer on this subject, having delivered keynote or plenary talks at the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Medical Association, and for dozens of other institutions and medical specialty organizations in the US and abroad. Her investigations of women’s under-representation in senior positions in academic medicine and the mechanisms that must be targeted to promote equity have been funded by an NIH R01 grant and grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, AMA, and other philanthropic funders. Active in organized medicine, she has served on the Steering Committee of the AAMC’s Group on Women in Medicine in Science, which recently recognized her with its Leadership Award.