Gender of faculty leadership and online advertised parental leave policies for American ophthalmology residency programs

Female medical trainees may face additional challenges to balancing career and personal goals, including parenthood. Barriers include lengthened training time, career advancement delay, and unfavorable competency assessments. This study examined advertised parental leave benefits across all accredited United States (US) Ophthalmology Residency Programs to examine the relationship between the gender of ophthalmology department leadership and parental leave policies. Programs identified using the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database. Advertised parental leave policies and figurehead gender (department chair and program directors) were extracted from institutional websites. The main outcome was prevalence of advertised parental leave benefits among programs. Secondarily, chi-square and phi correlation tests assessed association of figurehead gender with advertised benefits. Kruskal-Wallis analysis with post-hoc pairwise testing compared advertised benefits among US geographic regions. 124 ophthalmology training programs were identified. Females comprised 15.32% of all department chairs, 41.94% of all program directors, and held these positions in 37.10% of programs with advertised paid parental leave. 45 (36.3%) programs included paid parental leave policies on their institutional website. Gender of program director (p = 0.54) and department chair (p = 0.40) were not significantly associated with advertised parental leave benefits. Regional analysis revealed no significant differences in advertised policies between the eastern, central, and western US. Our methodology could not identify non-advertised albeit documented parental leave. Most programs did not advertise parental leave benefits. Such advertised benefits were not significantly associated with figurehead gender. Continued efforts are needed to improve acceptance and communication of parental leave benefits during training.