Lecture series on gender medicine at Innsbruck and Vienna medical universities: a teaching format in comparison

Introduction: Diversity-specific differences in health, illness and access to a health system have meanwhile been studied well. Educating medical students offers good leverage for broadening this knowledge within the medical professions. One approach is to use elective subjects. Project Description: The goal of this work is to compare the lecture series on Gender Medicine at the Medical Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. Results: The cornerstones of both of these lecture series (topics that vary per semester, various lecturers speaking on a predefined cross-cutting topic) are similar. Various approaches prevail for the target groups and the lecturers as well as the question of credit for external students. Both universities tackle different medical disciplines each semester while concentrating on gender-specific questions. Teacher evaluation in Innsbruck as well as the feedback from the students in Vienna show that the lecture series have a positive impact on how the various diversity categories influence health and illness. Discussion: Ensuring that a particular leitmotif runs through the various lectures of a lecture series entails increased planning and organizational work. On the other hand, various medical disciplines and their perspectives can be presented in a lecture series. Conclusion: The lecture series are embedded in overall strategies at the two universities. Ensuring the sustainability of the integration of Gender Medicine as a cross-cutting topic in medical education is, however, only possible when combined with other efforts.

Closing the gender leadership gap: a multi-centre cross-country comparison of women in management and leadership in academic health centres in the European Union

BACKGROUND

Women's participation in medicine and the need for gender equality in healthcare are increasingly recognised, yet little attention is paid to leadership and management positions in large publicly funded academic health centres. This study illustrates such a need, taking the case of four large European centres: Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Germany), Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), Medizinische Universität Wien (Austria), and Oxford Academic Health Science Centre (United Kingdom).

CASE

The percentage of female medical students and doctors in all four countries is now well within the 40-60% gender balance zone. Women are less well represented among specialists and remain significantly under-represented among senior doctors and full professors. All four centres have made progress in closing the gender leadership gap on boards and other top-level decision-making bodies, but a gender leadership gap remains relevant. The level of achieved gender balance varies significantly between the centres and largely mirrors country-specific welfare state models, with more equal gender relations in Sweden than in the other countries. Notably, there are also similar trends across countries and centres: gender inequality is stronger within academic enterprises than within hospital enterprises and stronger in middle management than at the top level. These novel findings reveal fissures in the 'glass ceiling' effects at top-level management, while the barriers for women shift to middle-level management and remain strong in academic positions. The uneven shifts in the leadership gap are highly relevant and have policy implications.

CONCLUSION

Setting gender balance objectives exclusively for top-level decision-making bodies may not effectively promote a wider goal of gender equality. Academic health centres should pay greater attention to gender equality as an issue of organisational performance and good leadership at all levels of management, with particular attention to academic enterprises and newly created management structures. Developing comprehensive gender-sensitive health workforce monitoring systems and comparing progress across academic health centres in Europe could help to identify the gender leadership gap and utilise health human resources more effectively.

Habilitations as a bottleneck? A retrospective analysis of gender differences at the Medical University of Vienna

BACKGROUND

The share of female physicians who drop out of a university career increases disproportionately with every career step. In this project, we analysed careers at the Medical University of Vienna (formerly the Medical Faculty at the University of Vienna) in the time span from 1992 to 2012 to explore the particular role of habilitations as a potential obstacle for women striving to pursue a career in science.

METHODS

To gain both a macro- and micro-view of the phenomenon of habilitations, a descriptive analysis of the data found in the archive of the Medical University of Vienna was carried out as a first step. Building on these results, structured interviews with the female physicians who were involved in the habilitation procedures at that time were conducted.

RESULTS

While hardly any gender-based differences or discrimination can be reported for the habilitation procedures themselves, the research clearly reveals that the disparity in habilitations by men and women is a manifestation of unequal access to informal networks, differences regarding integration in the scientific community and available time resources. It is unlikely that the rising number of women completing doctoral studies in the field of medicine will automatically lead to a harmonisation of habilitation numbers.

CONCLUSION

The analysis of existing gender-based differences with regard to habilitations in the field of medicine shows that they result from multiple processes that are subtle and relatively resistant to change.