Last time we saw the good, the top-ten scoring medical colleges. Today we examine the opposite end of the ranking.

Yes, US News & World Report’s top College of Medicine, Harvard, reports low numbers of women in leadership positions. Examining the actual gradecard (click on the name of the college) reveals a score for decanal positions at the national average, but lower scores for departmental leadership and full professors. Once again, Harvard reports no data for vice, assistant, or associate chairs of either gender, a common occurrence in the AAMC data. The scoring system adds no points to the numerator or denominator for these positions; however, the institution also does not get credit for female leadership at this level.

The worst overall score, University of Nebraska Medical Center, illustrates how this can hurt.  They reported no sub-chairs or section chiefs, so the departmental score consists solely of chairs. Since I have been an associate chair in a department at UNMC and I know many women in similar positions and serving as section chiefs, I know this institution hurt themselves by not reporting complete data. Of course, their decanal data fell way below average, and the proportion of female full professors did not make it up to the national average.

Four other schools in the bottom ten provided no data in at least one category: Kansas, Texas A&M, Louisiana State University-New Orleans, and Mercer. Kansas reported 33 department chairs and 1 sub-chair, but still scored 0 for women in departmental leadership; so even with decanal and full professor scores at the national average, their overall score came in below average. LSU-New Orleans reported no sub-chairs, but included data for 23 chairs and 45 section chiefs, so their overall score provides a better reflection of women in leadership there. Texas A&M and Mercer reported no data on sub-chairs or section chiefs, so their departmental scores of 0 may not reflect the real state of affairs.

The other four colleges provided complete data, but still scored poorly. Texas Tech-Foster, Saint Louis University, Mayo, and Louisiana State University-Shreveport all demonstrate below-average women in leadership positions.

Click to enlarge

Scanning the tabled US News data above and for the Top Ten demonstrated a couple of observations. First, the bottom group tended to be larger schools (median full-time faculty 681 vs. 410 for the Top Ten; p=0.22), although the difference did not reach statistical significance by Mann-Whitney rank sum test.  As shown in the graph, Top Ten schools enrolled significantly more women students than those at the bottom. The reasons for this difference cannot be gleaned from the data. As women earn more college degrees than men, attracting top talent will require recruiting women students (and ultimately faculty). Exploring the factors that induce students to matriculate at one school vs. another would be of interest; right now we know that these rankings had nothing to do with it.

So the bottom ten, from best (and I use that term in the relative sense) to worst:

• Kansas
• Harvard
• Texas Tech-Foster
• Texas A&M
• Saint Louis University
• Mayo
• Louisiana State University-New Orleans
• Mercer
• Louisiana State University-Shreveport
• Nebraska

Once again, more on the gradecard format can be found here.

Next up, we will go back to the upper part of the list.