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Gender differences amongst board members of endocrinology and diabetes societies

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Abstract

Purpose

Although women’s status has shown marked improvement over the years in many areas, women still face a gender bias, especially in the workforce. Despite the best efforts of organizations to promote diversity and equality, women still dominate the lower-paying administrative ranks while men continue to dominate at the executive level. The present study examines gender disparity in the leadership positions in the national and international endocrinology and diabetes societies across the globe.

Methods

We first composed a list of Diabetes and Endocrinology societies from online databases, including the International Diabetes Federation, European Society of Endocrinology, and other similar online directories. The Scopus database author search was used to find the total number of publications, publication range (in years), h-indices, number of citations, and years of active research of each member.

Results

Our study included 524 board members of whom 31.3% (164/524) were women. The institutional academic rank of 310 of the total board members was found. The proportion of women in higher-faculty ranks (Assistant Professor, Associate Professors, and Professors) is much lower than males. Female endocrinologists also have fewer publications, citations, and years of active research.

Conclusions

Endocrinology is becoming a female-predominant subspecialty of internal medicine. As women are becoming a more significant portion of the endocrinology workforce, it is imperative to study and mitigate gender differences and disparities to optimize the endocrinology workforce.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the endocrinology and diabetes societies, whose publicly available data made this study possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Internal Medicine, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan

    Yamna Waseem, Samar Mahmood, Rabbia Siddiqi, Muhammad Shariq Usman & Kaneez Fatima

  2. Department of Internal Medicine, John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Chicago, IL, USA

    Christine Acob

  3. Department of Radiology, Vancouver General Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Faisal Khosa

Authors
  1. Yamna Waseem
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  2. Samar Mahmood
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  3. Rabbia Siddiqi
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  4. Muhammad Shariq Usman
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  5. Kaneez Fatima
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  6. Christine Acob
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  7. Faisal Khosa
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Correspondence to Yamna Waseem.

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Waseem, Y., Mahmood, S., Siddiqi, R. et al. Gender differences amongst board members of endocrinology and diabetes societies. Endocrine 64, 496–499 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12020-019-01861-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12020-019-01861-9

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