NurseWeek

Ethnic medical faculty promoted less

By Grace Tsai, PhD
Health24News
September 7, 2000


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Washington (H24N). According to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Faculty Roster System, the official data system for tracking U.S. medical school faculty, minority faculty members are promoted at lower rates than white faculty.

The results were published in the latest issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and raise a host of issues in terms of racial and ethnic disparities found in the U.S. medical system.

Researchers compared the attainment of associate or full professorships among assistant professors and associate professors by 1997 among white, Asian or Pacific Islander (API), underrepresented minority (URM; including African-American, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, American Indian and Native Alaskan) and other Hispanic faculty.

The study population included 28,953 white, 2,997 API, 1,053 URM and 598 other Hispanic assistant professors; 14,559 white, 1,419 API, 280 URM and 286 other Hispanic associate professors.

Results showed that 46 percent of white assistant professors had been promoted, whereas 37 percent of API, 30 percent of URM, and 43 percent of other Hispanic assistant professors had been promoted.

Among associate professors, 50 percent of whites were promoted to full professors compared to 44 percent of API, 36 percent of URM and 44 percent of other Hispanics. According to the authors, even after adjusting for sex, tenure status, degree, department and medical school type, the underrepresented minority faculty remained less likely to be promoted compared with white faculty for both associate and full professor positions.

In an accompanying editorial, Stanley S. Bergen, MD, commented that this "unequal representation of URMs in U.S. medical schools is an unavoidable reflection of underlying racial barriers within U.S. society."

He goes on to make a case for recruiting minority medical students. Evidence has shown that URMs are more likely to serve patients from minority and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to practice in areas where there is a shortage of physicians and to serve patients with chronic illnesses or multiple diagnoses.

"U.S. medical schools must take a leadership role in appropriately creating more opportunities for qualified individuals to succeed in medicine, and to ensure equitable care for the health needs of the nation’s population," Bergen wrote.

In the same issue of JAMA, another study found that the number of applicants to the nation’s 125 medical schools fell for the third consecutive year in 1999. At 38,529, the number of applicants for last year’s freshman class was down 6 percent compared to 1998, when there were 41,004 applicants.