By Sophie Binks, DPhil

Dating back many years, it has been recognized that women are underrepresented in academic medicine. In 2008, the same year I began medical school—and after a degree in languages as well as my time in the workplace—the BMA published a detailed report on women in clinical academia. Across the range of metrics, women were unsurprisingly underrepresented in the field, including only 11 percent of professorial positions held by female clinical academics. While considerations of having and raising children are often at the forefront of discussions about women’s career advancement, the BMA report examined multiple and diverse factors that impede women’s career progression.

Since then, have matters improved for women pursuing research roles? A recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020 suggested that, while more women are present in the field, they are not equally appointed at the highest ranks. There has been some improvement, but it falls below equity. For example, in the US, the number of female full professors increased from 21 percent in 2013 to 29 percent in 2023. In the UK, we need to set this against the recent description of a crisis in academic medicine. Medical academics have decreased from 4.7 percent to 3.4 percent of consultants between 2009 and 2024, and early-career researchers (a description which includes my current role as a clinical lecturer) decreased by nearly 29 percent since 2015. This situation affects clinical academic men and women. There are many drivers, but some include precarious funding and job opportunities, as well as a lack of a national strategy to value and retain the academic workforce.

What is academic medicine?

Maybe that is because it’s not always well understood what clinical academics do. I’m often asked to describe what my job........

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