Gender inequality for tenure as Full Professor of medicine in France

Abstract

Introduction: Under-representation of women in high academic and medical positions is reported in many countries. This study aims to compare degrees and careers between men and women tenured as Full Professors of Medicine in recent years in France.

Methods: We identified all new tenured French Full Professors between 2017 and 2021 and collected the publicly available data (gender, year of birth, curriculum) from the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education, a public institution under the aegis of the Ministry for Higher Education Research and Innovation. The primary outcome was the gender difference in age appointment of Full Professors. Secondary outcomes were gender differences in career development.

Results: Among 820 Full Professors, only 266 (32.4%) were women. They were tenured at a later age than men (43.7 vs 42.4 years, p<0.001), while they graduated for the MD (29.5 vs 29.9 years, p<0.005) or PhD (35.3 vs 36.0 years, p<0.05) several months earlier. Women were also more often Associate Professors than men before becoming Full Professors (67.3% vs 59.2%, p<0.05). Before achieving Full professor tenure, the average delay is longer for women from MD graduation (14.6 vs 12.5 years), PhD graduation (8.7 vs 6.4 years), or Associate Professor nomination (7.5 vs 5.5 years), with a difference of 2.2, 2.4 and 2.0 years respectively (p<0.001 for all comparisons).

Conclusion: Gender inequalities remain in regards to access to Full Professor status, the highest position in the medical fields.

Keywords: Gender equity; Medical education; Sexism.

Fig. 1

Violin-plot representation of gender distribution and median delay (years) between MD graduation and tenure (a), PhD graduation and tenure (b), Associate Professor nomination and tenure (c).