Objective: Understanding the factors associated with attracting women to a residency program would help residency program leadership build programs that are appealing to women candidates. The objective of this study was to identify factors associated with the percentage of women residents in emergency medicine (EM) residency programs.Methods: A list of 161 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-approved EM residencies was compiled. The public websites for each of the residencies was queried for information on the following variables: residency region (Midwest, Northeast, South, West), residency length (3 years vs. 4 years), sex of the department chair, sex of the program director (PD), percentage of women faculty, and the number of residents by graduation class and sex.Results: The websites of 161 EM residencies were reviewed. Complete data were available from a total of 143 programs representing 4,547 residents from the studied classes of 2014, 2015, and 2016. Overall, 38% were women (n = 1,743). The percentage of women residents per program varied from 0% to 68% across residency programs. There was no association between the percentage of women residents and residency region, sex of the department chair, and sex of the PD.Conclusions: In this study, there was no evidence that EM residencies with a greater percentage of women faculty and women in select leadership roles had a greater percentage of women residents. There was also no evidence for regional variability in women's selection of residency programs. This study was limited to publicly available data and cannot address the many other complex factors which may play a role in women's decision making when choosing a residency.O ne of the success stories involving employment for women since the late 20th century has been the increasing proportion of women in the medical profession. While strides still need to be made in wage equality between the sexes within the house of medicine, the percentage of physicians who are women has increased from 10% of the medical student body in 1965 to 47% of medical students today. 1,2 The same upward trend has also occurred in the specialty of emergency medicine (EM). In 2001, women represented 28.3% of residents in EM, and by 2011 the percentage of women in EM residency programs increased to 39.8%. 1
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