Abstract
Purpose :
Cornea specialists represent the second largest subspecialty among academic ophthalmologists. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the gender differences among academic cornea specialists with regard to scholarly productivity and academic promotion.
Methods :
This study was a cross-sectional study of full-time academic cornea specialists listed on the institutional websites of all 113 allopathic US ophthalmology programs between January and March 2019. Using official institutional websites, data on gender and academic rank were obtained. Faculty members’ h-index, a published author’s scholarly productivity and citation impact, and m-quotient, a measure of scholarly productivity adjusted for career length, were obtained using the Scopus database. The study used chi-square tests to analyze categorical values and Wilcoxon Rank Sum tests to analyze continuous variables.
Results :
A total of 440 academic cornea specialists were identified, including 131 (29.8%) women and 309 (70.2%) men. A higher proportion of women compared to men were assistant professors [91 (69.5%) vs. 129 (41.7%); p<0.001] and a smaller proportion of women were full professors [17 (13.0%) vs. 115 (37.2%); p<0.001]. No significance difference was found among associate professor positions [female: 23 (17.6%) vs. male: 65 (21.0%); p=1.00] and department chair positions [5 (3.82%) vs. 29 (9.39%); p = 0.55]. Women had significantly lower median h-indices compared to their male counterpart (4.0 vs. 11.0; p<0.001), but similar median m-quotients (0.5 vs 0.5; p=1.00). Women also had a lower mean career length based on their residency graduation year compared to men (14.2 years vs 24.2 years; p <0.001).
Conclusions :
Female academic cornea specialists face a disparity in academic promotion as shown by the underrepresentation in senior academic ranks. Among cornea specialists, males had higher h-indices than females; however, no differences were seen in m-quotients. The data suggest that both the increased scholarly productivity and advanced academic rank associated with male gender is related to longer academic career length.
This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.