Disproportionate loss of women faculty from top universities greatly compromises our nation's academic talent pool. Under my leadership, Stanford School of Medicine has enacted important structural interventions (tenure clock flexibility, childcare, mentoring) that have proved necessary but not sufficient to fully support and retain women faculty. Social psychology demonstrates that stereotype threat (ST) diminishes women's performance in situations where women sense they will be judged by, or treated by negative stereotypes. Interventions that create positive social psychological environments can ameliorate ST, but have not been studied in faculty. Hypothesis: ST interventions improve women assistant professors'ability to capitalize on career advancement opportunities, and enhance academic success and retention. Building on past literature, I will conduct 10 focus groups of assistant professors (7 for women/3 for men) to identify triggers of ST and create video scenarios to sequentially test these triggers in laboratory settings. Physiological (heart rate, neural), behavioral (cognitive performance, thought suppression, memory), and psychological (feelings of belonging and motivation) manifestations of ST will be assessed. I will then assess, in real-life settings, the effect of a known ST intervention (STI) in which subjects read/discuss situations depicting how all junior faculty struggle with (and overcome) feelings of belonging. The one-year intervention will be compared to Mentoring and Academic Skills (MAS) enhancement and control, using a 2- Phase adaptive trial design. Phase 1: randomly assign 60 women and 60 men to STI or control (no intervention). Phase 2: three-group comparison, STI, STI+MAS, control - 30 per group. Primary outcomes are measures of women's perceptions of belonging, motivation, and reactions to adverse events. Secondary outcomes are laboratory assessments of ST, objective predictors of career advancement (grants and manuscripts submitted/published, 2-year retention rates). This first-ever research examining a ST intervention amongst women faculty will develop effective and replicable interventions to retain women faculty.
Disproportionate loss of women faculty from top universities greatly compromises our nation's academic talent pool, and despite our attention to factors such as tenure clock flexibility, childcare, and mentoring, we continue to lose women faculty. One potential reason for this is stereotype threat (ST), which diminishes women's performance in situations where women sense they will be judged by, or treated by negative stereotypes, ultimately leading them to disengaging from this negative environment. I will design and test interventions known to decrease this phenomenon in students, but which have never been tested in faculty. This first-ever research examining a ST intervention amongst women faculty will develop effective and replicable interventions to retain women faculty that might be applicable to other stereotyped groups such as racial and ethnic minorities in academic medicine.
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| Girod, Sabine; Fassiotto, Magali; Grewal, Daisy et al. (2016) Reducing Implicit Gender Leadership Bias in Academic Medicine With an Educational Intervention. Acad Med 91:1143-50 |
| Valantine, Hannah; Sandborg, Christy I (2013) Changing the culture of academic medicine to eliminate the gender leadership gap: 50/50 by 2020. Acad Med 88:1411-3 |
