Women Lead Dermatology’s Workforce but Remain Rare at the Top of Its Biggest Society

Women have made up the majority of the United States dermatology workforce since 2021, yet a new analysis of the American Academy of Dermatology’s leadership history shows that the profession’s highest elected office has remained overwhelmingly male for nearly nine decades. A research letter published in the Archives of Dermatological Research examined every known president of the academy from 1938 through 2025 and found that only seven percent of the organization’s presidents to date have been women. The study, led by Samantha Jo Albcker, Sharon A. Glick, and Jessica Lori Feig of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, paired this historical headcount with a detailed set of academic metrics, and its results raise an uncomfortable question about how leadership is chosen in a field that women now dominate numerically.

The researchers compiled a roster of eighty-four unique individuals who have served as president of the American Academy of Dermatology across the 1938 to 2025 period. Of those, seventy-eight were men and just six were women. The first woman to hold the presidency was elected only in 1992, more than half a century after the academy’s founding era. That means that for the first fifty-four years of the organization’s recorded leadership history, the office was held exclusively by men. Even in the decades since that first breakthrough, the pace of change has been slow: six women across thirty-three years of eligibility represents a fraction of the turnover the academy’s presidency has seen overall.

To understand whether the imbalance might reflect differences in qualifications rather than opportunity, the team turned to standard bibliometric measures of academic achievement. They calculated the average years of professional experience, the h-index, the total publication count, and the total citation count for male and female presidents separately. The h-index, a widely used metric in scientometrics, captures both the productivity of a researcher and the impact of their work: an author with an h-index of 30 has published at least thirty papers that have each been cited at least thirty times. Because it combines quantity and influence in a single number, it is often treated as a proxy for scholarly standing when comparing candidates for senior academic positions.

The comparison revealed a striking pattern. Men who became president averaged 29.1 years of experience, while women averaged 28.5 years, a negligible difference suggesting that both groups reached the presidency at comparable career stages. But on every measure of scholarly output, the women outperformed their male counterparts. The average h-index was 32.0 for men versus 34.5 for women. The average publication count was 132.1 for men versus 188.2 for women, meaning the average woman president had produced roughly forty percent more papers than the average man in the role. The gap widened further for citations: male presidents averaged 3,493.8 citations, while female presidents averaged 6,188.7, nearly seventy-seven percent more. In other words, the small group of women who broke through to the academy’s top office did so with scholarly records that were, on average, stronger than those of the men elected around them.

The authors then sharpened the historical lens by dividing the most recent sixty years of leadership into two thirty-year halves, comparing 1966 to 1995 with 1996 to 2025. This split revealed how much the profile of the academy’s presidency has changed over time, and how unevenly that change has been distributed between the sexes. In the earlier half, women held just 3.33 percent of presidencies. In the latter half, that figure rose to 16.7 percent, a fivefold increase that nonetheless leaves women far short of parity in a specialty where they now constitute the majority of practicing dermatologists.

Scholarship itself intensified across the two eras. The average h-index of presidents climbed from 25.9 in the 1966 to 1995 window to 56.9 in the 1996 to 2025 window, more than doubling. Average publication counts rose from 147.6 to 173.3, and average citation counts jumped from 3,671.3 to 6,280.5. These trends reflect broader shifts in academic medicine, where research productivity has become an increasingly important credential for leadership and where digital databases have made citation tracking routine. Notably, the study’s authors highlight that the growth in academic scholarship over time has been driven by women in particular, meaning the female presidents of the recent era arrived with exceptionally strong research credentials even as their numbers remained small.

The findings sit within a growing body of literature on gender and medical society leadership. Previous work had already documented sex trends in the academy’s leadership, including a 2020 cross-sectional study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, and a 2023 analysis in the same archives journal traced the evolution of leadership across American dermatology societies more broadly. Related research has measured h-index and scholarly productivity in academic dermatology in Canada, and a 2025 study in JACC: Advances examined the representation of women in professional medical society leadership across the United States and Europe. The new analysis extends this line of inquiry by covering the academy’s full presidential history through 2025 and by explicitly linking gender representation to quantifiable academic metrics.

The disconnect the study exposes is stark when set against workforce data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Since 2021, women have constituted most of the US dermatology workforce, making dermatology one of the most female-dominated medical specialties. Yet the presidency of its largest professional organization remains a position held by men in ninety-three percent of instances across the academy’s history. Researchers who study the so-called glass ceiling in academic medicine have long argued that such gaps rarely reflect differences in ability or ambition; the metrics in this study support that view, showing that the women who did ascend brought equal experience and superior publication and citation records. The bottleneck, the data imply, lies somewhere in the pathways of nomination, visibility, and election rather than in qualification.

The authors frame their work as a step toward understanding these gender trends so that equity in academic leadership can be actively promoted. Tracking the composition of leadership over time, they argue, is essential for identifying where interventions might succeed, whether in mentorship pipelines, nomination processes, or the culture of professional societies themselves. The study’s title invokes the idea of a dermocracy, a play on democracy and dermatology, underscoring the point that elected leadership should reflect the constituency it serves. With women now forming the majority of the specialty’s workforce and demonstrating, by the study’s own measures, higher average scholarly output when they do reach the top, the academy’s leadership statistics stand as a measurable indicator of how much institutional change remains to be achieved.

For the broader scientific community, the study offers a methodological template: pairing historical leadership rosters with bibliometric data turns anecdotal impressions of underrepresentation into quantifiable evidence. The numbers here tell a consistent story across every metric examined. Six women among eighty-four presidents. A first woman president only in 1992. A rise from 3.33 percent to 16.7 percent female leadership between the two halves of the past sixty years. And, throughout, women presidents with more publications, more citations, and a higher h-index than their male peers on average. Whether the coming decades bring the academy’s leadership closer to the demographics of its membership will depend on whether the profession acts on exactly the kind of evidence this analysis provides.

Subject of Research: Gender representation and scholarly productivity among American Academy of Dermatology presidents from 1938 to 2025

Article Title: “Dermocracy” and Breaking the Glass Ceiling: a gender analysis of American Academy of Dermatology Presidents from 1938 to 2025

Article References: Albucker, S. J., Glick, S. A., & Feig, J. L. (2026). “Dermocracy” and Breaking the Glass Ceiling: a gender analysis of American Academy of Dermatology Presidents from 1938 to 2025. Archives of Dermatological Research, 318(1), Article 438. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00403-026-04861-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00403-026-04861-8

Keywords: dermatology, gender disparities, leadership, American Academy of Dermatology, h-index, bibliometrics, women in medicine, academic medicine, glass ceiling, workforce, scholarly productivity, professional societies