Academic Radiology in North America: Underrepresentation of Women in Academic Ranks and Leadership Roles

Introduction Gender disparity persists in the top tiers of academic medicine and similar trends prevail in the leadership roles in North American academic institutions, despite an even gender balance of the medical graduates in North America. The purpose of our investigation was to study gender inequity in academic radiology in North America, by assessing and comparing the gender basis of academic rank and leadership roles as related to research productivity. Materials and Methods The Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database (FRIEDA) and Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS) were searched to generate a database of gender and academic profiles of radiology faculty members across academic institutions in North America. Bibliometric data were collected utilizing Elsevier’s SCOPUS as the reference source. Descriptive analytics were assessed using the SPSS (IBM, NY). Results Of 151 academic radiology institutions across North America, academic rank information was available for 2679 radiologists of which 66.7% (1787/2679) were men and 33.3% were women (892/2679). Assistant professor ( n = 1430/2679) constituted of 60.6% men ( n = 866/1430) and 39.4% women ( n = 564/1430) ( p < 0.001 for the United States and p < 0.002 for Canada). Amongst associate professors ( n = 679/2679), 71.1% are men ( n = 483/679) and 28.9% are women ( n = 196/679) ( p < 0.001 for both the United States and Canada), while full professor ( n = 570/2679), 76.8% are men ( n = 438/570) and 23.2% are women ( n = 132/570) ( p < 0.001 for both the United States and Canada). Leadership roles are held by 418 faculty members, out of which 71.3% are men ( n = 298/418) and 28.7% are women ( n = 120/418). Conclusion The majority of women academic radiologists are seen at the lowest rank of assistant professor, and are underrepresented in leadership roles. Women radiologists have less academic literature measures when compared with their male counterparts at all three ranks.