Promotion of Women Physicians in Academic Medicine

To the Editor. —In the article on gender differences in promotion, Dr Tesch and colleagues1state that there was no evidence that women had less academic preparation. We wonder if the assessment of academic preparation was too superficial to detect differences in preparation. For example, a study of graduates of family medicine fellowships found six variables that discriminated between graduates who published and those who did not. The six predictive variables were, in rank order, program affiliation (institution), training emphasis in fellowship on how data should be analyzed, time spent in research, encouragement to attend regional and national meetings (networking), current position (tenured vs nontenured), influence over own activities, and organization.2In the study by Tesch et al, given that sufficient detail to detect differences in preparation may not have been gathered, perhaps the true measure of the effectiveness of fellowship training and socialization were the significant differences