Influences for Gender Disparity in Academic Neuroradiology

There has been extensive interest in promoting gender equality within radiology, a predominately male field. In this study, our aim was to quantify gender representation in neuroradiology faculty rankings and determine any related factors that may contribute to any such disparity.

We evaluated the academic and administrative faculty members of neuroradiology divisions for all on-line listed programs in the US and Canada. After excluding programs that did not fulfill our selection criteria, we generated a short list of 85 US and 8 Canadian programs. We found 465 faculty members who met the inclusion criteria for our study. We used Elsevier's SCOPUS for gathering the data pertaining to the publications, H-index, citations, and tenure of the productivity of each faculty member.

Gender disparity was insignificant when analyzing academic ranks. There are more men working in neuroimaging relative to women (χ² = 0.46; P = .79). However, gender disparity was highly significant for leadership positions in neuroradiology (χ² = 6.76; P = .009). The median H-index was higher among male faculty members (17.5) versus female faculty members (9). Female faculty members have odds of 0.84 compared with male faculty members of having a higher H-index, adjusting for publications, citations, academic ranks, leadership ranks, and interaction between gender and publications and gender and citations (9).

Neuroradiology faculty members follow the same male predominance seen in many other specialties of medicine. In this study, issues such as mentoring, role models, opportunities to engage in leadership/research activities, funding opportunities, and mindfulness regarding research productivity are explored.