Hospital Program Shows Sustained Mentoring Can Lift Women in Academic Medicine

Academic medicine has a persistence problem. Women now enter medical schools in roughly equal numbers to men, and they complete residencies and fellowships at comparable rates, yet the higher rungs of the academic ladder remain stubbornly male. The leak in the pipeline has been documented for decades, and while institutions have responded with statements of commitment, far fewer have built programs that survive long enough to be evaluated. A new study published in BMC Medical Education offers a rare long-term look at one such effort, describing more than two decades of an institutional initiative at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, and providing detailed evaluation data on a leadership curriculum that ran from 2012 to 2017.

The program, known as Women (Physicians and Scientists) @ Children’s Hospital, or W@TCH, was established in 1999 with a straightforward mission: to support the professional development and advancement of women faculty at the institution. The new report, led by Kashvi Singh and Anitha S. John of the Division of Cardiology at Children’s National, together with colleagues from hospital medicine, pediatric critical care, emergency medicine, and hematology, focuses on one component of that mission, a Women in Leadership curriculum designed and delivered by the W@TCH committee over a five-year period.

The curriculum’s structure reflected a deliberate pedagogical choice. Rather than relying on passive lectures, the organizers built the program around interactive sessions paired with half-day workshops held at the end of each academic year. Topics were selected to address the specific needs of junior faculty, the career stage at which many women physicians and scientists face competing pressures from clinical duties, research expectations, family responsibilities, and the unwritten rules of academic advancement. The end-of-year workshops gave participants extended time to engage with material, practice skills, and build relationships with colleagues they might otherwise rarely meet across departmental lines.

Evaluation of the curriculum relied on post-event surveys in which participants rated aspects of each workshop on a five-point Likert scale, a standard instrument in medical education research that quantifies subjective satisfaction while allowing comparison across events and years. The results were consistent. Attendees rated Women in Leadership events as very effective or highly effective throughout the program’s run. More tellingly, the median satisfaction score rose over time, climbing from 4.5 out of 5 in 2013 to 4.75 out of 5 in 2017. In evaluation research, where scores often plateau or drift downward as novelty fades, a rising trend across five years suggests that the committee was successfully refining content in response to participant feedback.

The study also captured a longer horizon. In a follow-up survey administered in 2024, seven years after the curriculum period ended, 93 percent of respondents expressed interest in more W@TCH-related events. That figure matters because the central weakness of most professional development interventions is durability: enthusiasm measured immediately after a workshop rarely predicts lasting engagement. A demand signal persisting years later indicates that participants continued to see value in the community the program created, not merely in the individual sessions.

The authors frame the Women in Leadership curriculum as one component of a broader institutional initiative rather than a standalone fix. W@TCH, more than 25 years after its founding, remains active across five pillars: mentoring, networking, leadership development, faculty recognition, and advocacy. This breadth is significant from a program-design perspective. Mentoring relationships address individual guidance, networking builds the social capital that influences promotion decisions, recognition counters the visibility gap that affects women’s scholarly reputations, and advocacy targets institutional policy itself. A curriculum alone touches only one of these mechanisms; the sustained architecture appears to be what keeps the program alive.

The technical context for this work is the well-documented disparity structure of academic medicine. Data compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges have long shown that women are underrepresented among full professors, department chairs, and deans relative to their share of medical school graduates. The causes are multifactorial, encompassing differences in access to sponsorship, unequal distribution of service and teaching loads, promotion timelines that collide with childbearing years, and climates that can be unwelcoming in subtle ways. Interventions therefore need to be evaluated not just on whether participants enjoyed them, but on whether they plausibly address one or more of these mechanisms. The W@TCH report is candid about its scope: it demonstrates feasibility, sustained engagement, and high satisfaction, which are necessary but not sufficient conditions for changing promotion outcomes.

That limitation is worth stating plainly, because it defines the frontier of this research area. The study’s evaluation data are drawn from post-event surveys and a retrospective follow-up, and the authors do not claim that the curriculum by itself increased promotions, grants, or leadership appointments among participants. Measuring such outcomes would require long-term tracking of career trajectories against matched comparison groups, a design that few institutions have implemented. What the report does establish is that a volunteer-driven, committee-run program can maintain quality and demand across many years, which is itself a nontrivial finding. Most diversity and development initiatives are episodic; they launch with funding or enthusiasm and fade within a few grant cycles. W@TCH’s longevity, sustained without reported external funding, suggests that institutional embedding and a dedicated committee structure can substitute for dedicated budget lines.

For other institutions considering similar programs, the report offers several transferable design lessons. First, content should be driven by the articulated needs of junior faculty rather than by what senior leadership assumes those needs are; the authors report that curriculum topics were relevant to participants’ needs, and the rising satisfaction scores are consistent with that alignment. Second, interactive formats and extended workshops appear to outperform passive formats in generating engagement, echoing broader findings in adult learning research. Third, evaluation should be built in from the start, because the Likert-scale survey data collected routinely after each event are what made this retrospective analysis possible at all. Programs that skip systematic evaluation forfeit the ability to demonstrate their value when institutional priorities shift.

The broader significance of the study lies in its reframing of what gender equity work in medicine can look like. Rather than a one-off training or a compliance exercise, the W@TCH model treats the advancement of women faculty as a continuous institutional function, comparable to quality improvement in clinical care: measured iteratively, adjusted based on data, and sustained across leadership transitions. The authors conclude that sustained programs such as W@TCH may serve as important mechanisms to promote the advancement, retention, and leadership development of women in academic medicine. As hospitals and medical schools confront persistent attrition among women physicians and scientists, the evidence from Children’s National suggests that the question is no longer whether such programs can work, but whether institutions are willing to commit to them for decades rather than years. The 93 percent of former participants who still wanted more, a quarter-century after the program began, may be the most persuasive data point of all.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of a women's leadership development curriculum in academic medicine

Article Title: Striving for success: essential skills for women in academic medicine

Article References: Striving for success: essential skills for women in academic medicine. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10428-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10428-y

Keywords: academic medicine, women in leadership, gender equity, medical education, career development, mentoring, faculty advancement, W@TCH, Children's National Hospital, professional development, leadership training, retention