Women in oncology pharmacy leadership: A white paper

Accomplished women leaders in informatics: insights about successful careers

We sought to learn from the experiences of women leaders in informatics by interviewing women in Informatics leadership roles. Participants reported career challenges, how they built confidence, advice to their younger selves, and suggestions for attracting and retaining additional women. Respondents were 16 women in leadership roles in academia (n = 9) and industry (n = 7). We conducted a thematic analysis revealing: (1) careers in informatics are serendipitous and nurtured by supportive communities, (2) challenges in leadership were profoundly related to gender issues, (3) "Big wins" in informatics careers were about making a difference, and (4) women leaders highlighted resilience, excellence, and personal authenticity as important for future women leaders. Sexism is undeniably present, although not all participants reported overt gender barriers. Confidence and authenticity in leadership point to the value offered by individual leaders. The next step is to continue to foster an informatics culture that encourages authenticity across the gender spectrum.

A vision to advance gender equality within pharmacy leadership: Next steps to take the profession forward

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 to 'achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls' aims to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and girls and ensure their full and effective participation in all spheres of life. In alignment with this, several key international initiatives are making progress towards gender equality in the pharmacy profession. The pharmacy profession must support women and accelerate the progress of women in leadership positions in pharmacy. International and national pharmacy professional bodies can play a critical role in fostering the change required to improve gender equality in all regions and countries. The ongoing development, evaluation and implementation of policies and initiatives are critical to a profession that is increasingly becoming feminised. Furthermore, there is an imperative to deeply understand the gender-based barriers and develop evidence-based strategies and solutions to support women in pharmacy leadership. There is extensive literature and research on gender inequality and its impact on leadership outside pharmacy which could be used strategically for the profession to develop its own evidence based strategic position. Robust initiatives are needed to ensure that women at all levels including women in pharmacy leadership are empowered and encouraged to participate in their profession. This commentary seeks to generate and contribute to the debate to ensure the profession is proactive and deliberate in tackling the challenges that have traditionally impeded women reaching leadership positions and several critical actions as next steps are proposed. Action is needed to improve gender equality in pharmacy leadership and a profession-wide discussion on ways to progress the above proposed actions is critically needed.

What drives job satisfaction among community pharmacists? An application of relative importance analysis

Background

Pharmacy employers want to improve pharmacists' job satisfaction, but ratings of job satisfaction are highly subjective, as evaluating job satisfaction involves weighing simultaneously the importance of multiple correlated determinants that are often perceived unequally.

Objectives

To 1) describe the application of relative importance analysis in estimating the predictive ability of correlated determinants of job satisfaction, and to rank the determinants in order of relative importance, and 2) explore how the perceived relative importance of job satisfaction predictors may vary across community pharmacists' age, gender, and work setting categories.

Methods

Data were obtained from the 2019 National Pharmacy Workforce Survey administered to 96,110 licensed U.S. pharmacists. Multiple regression analysis (MR) and relative weight analysis (RWA) were used to assess the predictive ability of determinants to explain pharmacists' job satisfaction. Subgroup analyses were performed to explore variations in the perceived relative importance of predictors across pharmacists' age, gender and work setting categories.

Results

Over the entire sample of community pharmacists, no personal experience of workplace discrimination [RW = 0.0613, rank = 1] and less reported engagement in advanced dispensing activities [RW = 0.0235, rank = 2] were most associated with greater job satisfaction, as both predictors jointly accounted for 67.5% of the predicted criterion variance (R ²). Pharmacists' compensation was observed to have the lowest perceived relative importance for predicting job satisfaction [RW = 0.0005, rank = 6], accounting for 0.5% of R ². Between-group comparisons showed that, no personal experience of workplace discrimination had the highest perceived relative importance for job satisfaction across pharmacists' age groups, among women, and across most work settings except small chain pharmacies. Within-group comparisons showed that pharmacists' compensation was significantly more important than professional interactions (Δ_RW(PC-PPI) 0.2900 [0.0637, 0.5360]) for job satisfaction among pharmacists in large chain pharmacies, while patient-care services was significantly more important than compensation for job satisfaction in independent (Δ_RW(PPS-PC) 0.1761 [0.0017, 0.5980]) and health system retail pharmacists (Δ_RW(PPS-PC) 0.4190 [0.0444, 0.8303]).

Conclusions

Relative importance analysis corroborated multiple regression and provided a more interpretable presentation of variable influence on community pharmacists job satisfaction as the importance of personal and workplace characteristics in how pharmacists evaluate their job satisfaction varied across age, gender and work setting categories.

Gender inequality in PGY1 residency leadership positions and conferral of health-system pharmacy professional awards

DISCLAIMER

In an effort to expedite the publication of articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic, AJHP is posting these manuscripts online as soon as possible after acceptance. Accepted manuscripts have been peer-reviewed and copyedited, but are posted online before technical formatting and author proofing. These manuscripts are not the final version of record and will be replaced with the final article (formatted per AJHP style and proofed by the authors) at a later time.

PURPOSE

To address gender inequality, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) created a steering committee that recommended the collection of baseline and ongoing metrics of pharmacy leadership. The purpose of this study was to quantify gender inequality in distributions of residency program director (RPD) and director of pharmacy (DOP) positions and to investigate gender distributions among recipients of ASHP professional leadership awards.

METHODS

RPD and DOP information for postgraduate year 1 (PGY1) programs included in the online ASHP Residency directory were collected in December of 2020. Publicly available records were used to collect information on recipients of the Harvey A.K. Whitney Award and John W. Webb Award during the periods 1950-2020 and 1985-2020, respectively. Gender information for RPDs, DOPs, and award recipients was collected from listed pronouns available in public records. A χ 2 test was used for analysis of the collected data.

RESULTS

A total of 1,176 PGY1 residency programs were included. Of the RPD positions assessed, 66% (n = 775) were filled by women pharmacists (P < 0.0001), while the percentage of DOP leadership positions held by women was 42% (n = 496) (P < 0.0001). Evaluation of data on recipients of the Harvey A.K. Whitney Award and John W. Webb Award revealed the occurrence of female recipients is 19.7% (n = 14) and 16.7% (n = 6), respectively (P < 0.0001).

CONCLUSION

RPD positions have a higher prevalence of being filled by women. DOP positions remain male-dominated and revealed gender inequality among senior-level leadership roles. Pharmacy leadership award analysis identified further gender inequality. The results from the study serve as a baseline of current gender metrics for pharmacy leaderships in hospital systems with PGY1 residency programs.