Women in Academic Psychiatry: A Mind to Succeed

There has never been a better time to be a woman in academic psychiatry. The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology has made a major push in recent years to increase its proportion of female members and to promote women in leadership roles. The Society of Biological Psychiatry has formed a Senior Women’s Leadership Group to foster greater involvement of women in the society at all levels, and it will host a special evening workshop for senior academic female leaders at its annual meeting in May. In just the past 8 months, three vacant psychiatry department chair positions at major universities have been filled by women.

Role models now abound of creative and productive academic psychiatrists who happen to be women. We also now understand the key skills that support a successful career, meaning we can explicitly teach these skills to women entering the field. Sophia Frangou, in the approachable book she has edited, Women in Academic Psychiatry: A Mind to Succeed, takes on both of these important developments. She presents 16 essays by successful academic women who speak with their own voices, describing the different paths they took to prominence in their field. She then follows these personal narratives with 10 brief but well-researched chapters on how to “Plan Your Way,” covering topics from “The Pursuit of Happiness” to “Be Persistent,” with detours to “Project Confidence” and “Be Memorable” along the way.

The timing of Dr. Frangou’s book is fortuitous because despite recent advances, it appears that much work still remains. Even after 15 years of awareness and attempts at corrective action, a recent report found that women in academic medicine are paid on average $20,500 less than male colleagues (1). In the last several months alone, I found myself coaching two extremely productive and creative female colleagues to advocate for themselves: one midcareer woman at a prominent university who needed to negotiate for salary corrections after years of discrepancy in her compensation, and one early-career woman whose professional trajectory was getting stalled under a senior mentor who did not support her independence and advancement. An even more sobering situation occurred last year when I provided mentoring to an ambitious and outspoken early midcareer colleague who was very shaken when a senior male colleague told her she was “abrasive.” In all three of these cases, Dr. Frangou would tell us that two sets of factors were at play: what she identifies as “external barriers” (societal attitudes; the greater comfort men have with being dominating) and “internal barriers” (women’s proclivity to self-doubt and guilt).

With its straightforward, focused, and supportive narrative style, this slim volume provides a remarkably clear-sighted and optimistic path forward through these barriers for all of us. A central tenet is that no one can define success for you. For each and every one of us, success is a highly personal and multidimensional concept, one that may very well change over the course of our lives. None of us should be confined by a restrictive generalization, whether it is someone else’s definition of what a successful academic career looks like, or what it means to be a “good mother,” or what kind of research questions to pursue. In keeping with this theme, the personal essays are refreshingly honest and individually unique. Dr. Antonia New writes of being considered “brash” and of her frustration when her husband is considered a “super dad” if he arranges a playdate, while she is given the message that as a working mom she is never doing enough. Dr. Mary Phillips describes dealing with self-doubt. Dr. Patricia Suppes describes the importance of maintaining confidence in her scientific vision even during dark days. These women are also funny. Dr. Judy Ford answers the question “What would you do differently if you were to start your career now?” by using only two words: day care! Many speak about mentors and role models they relied on—Myrna Weissman’s name comes up more than once—and many speak about learning to trust their own ideas.

Indeed, if there is a theme throughout the book, it is the theme of how to develop self-confidence. In a recent conversation I had with Merav Ahissar, a prominent Israeli neuroscience researcher, she noted that even when there might be opportunities, women will often not put themselves forward for leadership roles. We mused together that for many women, conflict and competition (especially conflict in the workplace) are very aversive, and so women may not apply for higher leadership positions in which managing overt conflict and competing for resources are integral parts of the role, even though they are highly accomplished individuals.

Why might this be? Gavin de Becker, a specialist in corporate and private security issues and someone with a lot of experience with fear and safety, is credited with an interesting observation: “At their core,” he said, “Women fear that men will kill them.” He was referring to the essential sense of physical vulnerability that women experience, which is heightened by a continuous barrage of media images and stories in which females are powerless victims, as well as directly experienced micro-aggressive behavior. I suspect that the cumulative effect, perhaps at deep and unconscious levels, may be that many women find it inherently quite aversive to engage with men in the kinds of verbal and interpersonal sparring and self-promoting behaviors that are part of leadership roles.

Can this change? Dr. Frangou would argue that it can, that it is changing already, and that it is well within our power to develop the skills that will allow us and our ideas as academic psychiatrists to thrive. It is only a matter of the four Ps: practice, persistence, and putting ourselves forward in the pursuit of happiness.