Women in Medicine Summit offers skill-building, ways to work toward gender equity
The Women in Medicine Summit will take place Sept. 22 and 23, in Chicago.
The 2-day summit offers education, toolkits, skill-building, networking and other opportunities to amplify women in medicine and work toward gender equity in health care. More than 400 health care professionals are expected to attend. For those unable to attend the conference in person, live streaming will be available. In addition, recordings of the presentations will be available for 11 months after the conference for virtual and in-person attendees.
“My hope is that everyone leaves this meeting feeling empowered to change things within their own systems and within their own professional and personal lives. That is an incredibly powerful part of this conference,” Shikha Jain, MD, FACP, associate professor of medicine with tenure in the division of hematology/oncology at University of Illinois Cancer Center in Chicago and consulting editor for Healio Women in Oncology, told Healio.
Jain, also chair and founder of the Women in Medicine Summit, president of the nonprofit Women in Medicine, and host of Healio’s Oncology Overdrive podcast, spoke with Healio about her goals for this year’s summit and all it has to offer.
Healio: What are you most looking forward to at this year’s summit?
Jain: As always, I’m excited to see everyone and to have all of these amazing individuals of all genders together from around the country — and really around the world — to talk about important topics and to learn from everyone. I’m also excited to see new faces and catch up with people who have attended in the past. I am thrilled that we have the first ever physician entrepreneur fashion show, where we will highlight multiple physician founders who have developed clothing lines, eyeglasses and shoes. Attendees will be able to try on styles and purchase them from Green Cloud Apparel, Tribal Eyes and Enrico Cuini. We will also have a book signing with multiple physician women authors, and we will have an anthology of works from individuals in medicine that will be available for purchase as well as a special book signing with several of the authors.
Healio: What makes this meeting so unique?
Jain: The summit is unique for a variety of reasons. We bring together individuals from all different disciplines and there are very few conferences focused on the gender gap as it applies to those in all areas of health care and medicine. In addition, we always have a significant focus on male allyship and how this work cannot be done by just those who identify as women. We need people who are in leadership positions to step up and in many cases, those are male allies. We have a large focus on encouraging people who identify as men to come to the conference to learn how they can be better allies and how they can work toward closing the gender gap.
Also, we have seen a huge shift within the past several years when it comes to women’s health and the attack that we have seen on women’s reproductive rights. All of these things are going to have an overall impact on life expectancy, mortality and on the health of our communities in general. We also have sessions this year focused on advocacy and how to advocate for policies in local and national government to protect our patients and our communities. There will also be an entire lunch session this year on the state of women’s health and how we can impact the workforce as well as how we can use our platform and our abilities to directly impact patient care.
Healio: Which presenters are you most looking forward to?
Jain: This year’s speaker lineup is phenomenal. From Megan Ranney, MD, to Rana Awdish, MD, MS, and so many other wonderful and inspiring speakers. Every single one of our faculty members this year is so phenomenal. Some of these amazing faculty I have never met in person, including Tiffany Moon, MD, and Heather Irobunda, MD, FACOG. Others have become dear friends over the years, including Kimberly Manning, MD, and Vineet M. Arora, MD, MAPP. It’s humbling to be able to meet and mingle with so many incredible people over the course of the conference.
Healio: What is your ultimate goal for this meeting?
Jain: My hope is that attendees leave with new networks of people they can connect with and continue to interact with after the summit to grow their communities and abilities to succeed in their careers. I ultimately hope that this particular conference allows attendees to learn skills and tools that they can take back and teach others and train others on how to work toward closing the gender gap in health care because it impacts every single one of us, even if we don’t necessarily know that it’s impacting us directly.
Healio: Is there anything else that you would like to mention?
Jain: Registration is still open for both in person and virtual attendance, and we would love to see everyone there. We are anticipating that we will sell out this year for in-person registration, so I highly recommend registering soon if interested. Many have started using this conference as a “mini reunion” where they get together with their friends from medical school or residency, which is so nice. We also offer childcare, so for those worried that they don’t know who will take care of their children, we make sure that we have that available. We also provide lactation rooms. We really try to make this conference as easy as possible to attend without the common barriers that many of us often face.
I also want to emphasize the bulk of the conference is only on Friday and Saturday until the late afternoon, so if attendees bring their family or if they plan it as a reunion with friends, they will have Saturday night and all day Sunday free to enjoy the city of Chicago.
We want to ensure that this an experience for attendees to learn and grow and to also enjoy the time exploring Chicago. For more information about the summit or to register, go to www.womeninmedicinesummit.org.
For more information:
Shikha Jain, MD, FACP, can be reached on X (Twitter): @ShikhaJainMD.
Collapse
Healio Interviews
Read more about