National Email Communication Platforms May Indicate or Contribute to Gender Disparities: Preliminary Analysis of an Academic Medicine Listserv.

Gender disparities are well documented in the academic medicine literature and have been shown to impact representation, rank, and leadership opportunities for women. Social media platforms, including electronic mailing lists (listservs), may contribute to disparities by differentially highlighting or promoting individuals' work in academic and public health settings. Because of this, they provide a record by which to assess the presence of gender disparities; therefore, they become tools to identify gender differences in the frequency or pattern of representation.

Changing the Culture of Academic Medicine: Critical Mass or Critical Actors?

Purpose: By 2006, women constituted 34% of academic medical faculty, reaching a critical mass. Theoretically, with critical mass, culture and policy supportive of gender equity should be evident. We explore whether having a critical mass of women transforms institutional culture and organizational change.

Retaining Faculty in Academic Medicine: The Impact of Career Development Programs for Women.

Background: For more than two decades, national career development programs (CDPs) have addressed underrepresentation of women faculty in academic medicine through career and leadership curricula. We evaluated CDP participation impact on retention.

Methods: We used Association of American Medical Colleges data to compare 3268 women attending CDPs from 1988 to 2008 with 17,834 women and 40,319 men nonparticipant faculty similar to CDP participants in degree, academic rank, first year of appointment in rank, and home institution.

Narratives of Participants in National Career Development Programs for Women in Academic Medicine: Identifying the Opportunities for Strategic Investment.

Background: Academic medicine has initiated changes in policy, practice, and programs over the past several decades to address persistent gender disparity and other issues pertinent to its sociocultural context. Three career development programs were implemented to prepare women faculty to succeed in academic medicine: two sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which began a professional development program for early career women faculty in 1988. By 1995, it had evolved into two programs one for early career women and another for mid-career women.

Underinsurance before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act: From the Research Involving Outpatient Settings Network (RIOS Net).

Background: As the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is implemented and many uninsured become insured, rates of underinsurance may persist or increase. This study was designed to estimate the rate of underinsurance in primary care safety net clinics serving low income, multiethnic populations in New Mexico.

Methods: Data were collected from 2 primary care clinics in an urban setting during a 2-week period in 2011 and 2012.

Perceptions of skill development of participants in three national career development programs for women faculty in academic medicine.

Purpose: The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and Drexel University College of Medicine have designed and implemented national career development programs (CDPs) to help women faculty acquire and strengthen skills needed for success in academic medicine. The authors hypothesized that skills women acquired in CDPs would vary by career stage and program attended.

Method: In 2011, the authors surveyed a national cohort of 2,779 women listed in the AAMC Faculty Roster who also attended one of three CDPs (Early- and Mid-Career Women in Medicine Seminars, and/or Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine) between 1988 and 2010 to examine their characteristics and CDP experiences.

Systems of career influences: a conceptual model for evaluating the professional development of women in academic medicine.

Background: Surprisingly little research is available to explain the well-documented organizational and societal influences on persistent inequities in advancement of women faculty.

Methods: The Systems of Career Influences Model is a framework for exploring factors influencing women's progression to advanced academic rank, executive positions, and informal leadership roles in academic medicine. The model situates faculty as agents within a complex adaptive system consisting of a trajectory of career advancement with opportunities for formal professional development programming; a dynamic system of influences of organizational policies, practices, and culture; and a dynamic system of individual choices and decisions.

Acanthosis Nigricans: high prevalence and association with diabetes in a practice-based research network consortium--a PRImary care Multi-Ethnic network (PRIME Net) study.

Background: Previous work has established a surprisingly high prevalence of acanthosis nigricans (AN) and its association with increased risk of type 2 diabetes in a Southwestern practice-based research network (PBRN). Our objective was to establish whether this high prevalence of AN would be present in other areas.

Methods: We examined the prevalence of type 2 diabetes and its risk factors and the prevalence of AN among patients aged 7 to 65 years who had been seen by one of 86 participating clinicians in a national PBRN consortium during a 1-week data collection period.