Brown Named First Medical Associate Dean for Women

Professor to expand on work done with Women's Initiative

Monday, February 16, 2004

Ann Brown, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and obstetrics & gynecology, has been appointed associate dean for women in medicine and science. In this newly created position, Brown will spearhead initiatives to study and enhance the environment for female faculty and learners within the Duke School of Medicine, and to fulfill the goals of the university-wide Women's Initiative.

"Ann Brown has distinguished herself by superlative performance as director of our Academic Program in Women's Health and by service on the steering committee for the Women's Initiative organized by President Keohane," said School of Medicine Dean R. Sanders Williams, M.D. "From her new post, she will be in yet a stronger position to improve the climate within Duke Medical Center for success by female faculty and learners. The benefits of her activities, of course, will accrue to us all."

As associate dean, Brown will lead the medical school's implementation of Women's Initiative recommendations, serve as chair of a dean's advisory committee on women and continue to work as a member of the university-wide President's Commission on the Status of Women.

Brown now serves as director of the Academic Program in Women's Health.

"My first and foremost goal will be implementation of the Women's Initiative recommendations within the medical center," Brown said. "Dr. Williams has already released an 11-point response to the initiative. I will keep that list in front of me and work with the dean's advisory committee to make the response happen. Some of the points are already being put into place."

One of the important findings of the initiative -- and one key focus for Brown in her new position -- was an unequal distribution of women among the different academic ranks. The initiative found that an equal number of women and men faculty in the clinical sciences are entering careers in academic medicine in the medical center, but that women faculty aren't advancing to senior ranks at the same rate as men. In the basic sciences, it appears that too few women are choosing to take academic positions after completing their post-doctoral training.

"There remains a stubborn paucity of women at the professor level in both the clinical and basic sciences for perhaps different reasons," Brown said. "One of my goals is to understand the problems in both the clinical and basic sciences and to work with faculty and the dean to find strategies to improve our climate and our numbers of women faculty, particularly where there is a gender difference.

"It's not a pipeline issue, because we have roughly equal numbers of women and men standing at the gateway to successful academic careers in the basic and clinical sciences," she said. "But among the clinical faculty, the distribution of men faculty is pretty equal among the three tenure track ranks at the medical center, with very few in associate or pre-tenure positions. For women, the largest numbers are found at the two lower ranks in the pre-tenure and assistant professor ranks."

Brown said the Women's Initiative also found that the traditional system of mentoring wasn't working for all of the different pathways at the medical center and could be one reason why women were not rising in the ranks.

"What generally happens in medicine is that a junior faculty member serves 'at the foot of a master,' observing, learning and then becoming independent after a long period of a close apprenticeship with a mentor," Brown said.

"We have a problem with that now. There just isn't time for either junior or senior faculty members for this system to work well. In focus groups done in the medical center last spring, faculty at all ranks told us that they have many more responsibilities -- related to the increasing complexity of medical care, regulatory issues in clinical care and research and declining clinical revenues - and that the traditional apprentice type approach to mentoring just doesn't work well any more for an increasingly diverse faculty. And it's not just junior faculty members telling us that. Senior faculty are saying the same thing."

The mentoring issue applies to junior faculty of both genders, Brown said. In fact, some of the important work climate issues raised by the Women's Initiative shouldn't be seen as a women's issue at all, she said.

"Family is not just a women's issue," she said. "Balance between work and home isn't a women's issue. In our focus groups, men and women of all ranks told us they wanted to be full participants in their family lives. Men as well as women face workplace barriers to this. Men in the focus groups expressed frustration with the perception that making family a priority may be interpreted as not taking their careers seriously enough.

"What I hope to do is to take these issues and reframe them as work climate issues. I want to ask what can the workplace do for us so that we can all contribute to the medical center and university and still be vitally involved in other important arenas of life?

"And it's not just a matter of family issues. I don't have children, but I have other interests. And the other interests make me a better doctor. An academic career tends to ask you to walk a very narrow path toward success. To some extent it asks you to forgo other interesting detours. These detours and other priorities are part of what makes us a diverse faculty, and we need to be able to accommodate and honor that diversity to attract and retain the best faculty."

A native of Michigan, Brown received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College and her medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine. She did a residency in internal medicine at Yale before coming to Duke in 1991 as a fellow. She joined the faculty in 1993, where she founded the Women's Health Seminar Series in 1996.

Brown's office will sponsor a two-day visit by Janet Bickel, a national expert in women in medicine and recent associate vice president and director of the Women in Medicine Program for the Association of American Medical Colleges. Bickel will be at Duke March 4-5 and will give several presentations, including a Medical Grand Rounds talk at 7:30 a.m. March 5 in 2002 Duke Hospital on "Gender, Ethnicity and Generational Differences in Mentoring Relationships: Turning a Challenge into a Strength."

She also will lead a seminar for medical center leadership from 4 to 6 p.m. March 4 on "Finding the Next Generation of Leadership for Academic Medicine" and for junior faculty at noon March 5 on "Thinking Like the CEO of Your Own Career."

For more information about the talks, call 684-4139.