Workplace culture can stunt action against gender-based discrimination
Male physician leaders reported feeling troubled by gender-based discrimination against female colleagues but did not take action at times due to unsupportive workplace cultures, according to study results published in JAMA Network Open.
The findings indicate the need for institutional culture change that supports interventions of upstanders and does not tolerate gender-based discrimination, researchers concluded.
“There are numerous gender-based discrimination studies that have looked at the lived experiences of women physicians with gender-based discrimination,” Maya S. Iyer, MD, MEd, pediatric emergency medicine physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, told Healio. “We were interested in understanding the perspectives of male physicians who witness, learn of or perpetrate gender-based discrimination toward women. This is important to address so that we can target not only faculty development but also understand how gender-based discrimination may affect recruitment and retention efforts.”
Iyer and colleagues sought to examine and describe responses among male physician leaders to gender-based discrimination toward their women colleagues.
The secondary data analysis included semistructured interviews conducted via teleconferencing from a previous qualitative descriptive study between April 2020 and February 2021. The interviews included questions about the perception of the influence of gender and leadership in academic medicine among 18 male (mean age, 52.2 years; mean time as department chair, 7.2 years) academic chairs in emergency medicine across 18 sites.
Researchers pooled data associated with gender-based discrimination and used conventional content analysis to code findings that were then grouped into themes and subthemes and summarized.
Main outcomes included qualitative findings identifying experiences witnessing or learning about incidents of gender-based discrimination against female colleagues, the impact of observations and personal or leadership actions taken in response to observations.
Interview results
Results showed that all male physician leaders experienced incidents of gender-based discrimination against female colleagues. Men reported feeling anger, disbelief, guilt and shame when witnessing gender-based discrimination.
Researchers identified three participant narrative themes, including emotional response to gender-based discrimination, actions taken to address discrimination and reasons for not acting against discrimination.
Male physician leaders reported taking action against discrimination, included serving as upstanders, confronting and reporting discrimination, providing faculty development on gender-based discrimination and enforcing zero-tolerance policies.
Conversely, reasons for not taking action against discrimination included the belief that the gender-based discrimination did not warrant a response, the perception of a power differential or unsupportive institutional culture or seeking self-preservation.
Call for change
Male allyship is an interesting topic in academic medicine, and there is certainly room for improvement, especially in how to establish such allyship early in medical training, Iyer told Healio.
“Gender-based discrimination does not occur in a vacuum in academic medicine. Many times, it is observed and witnesses do not act upon it as upstanders for numerous reasons, but often because they do not feel that their workplace culture will support them,” Iyer said. “Our paper suggests that the hierarchical culture of academic medicine must change to one that enables anyone to speak out against gender-based discrimination in such a way that they do not have to fear retaliation but feel supported instead.”
For more information:
Maya S. Iyer, MD, Med, can be reached at maya.iyer@nationwidechildrens.org.
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