Mustaches Outnumber Women Among Medical-School Leaders

Courtesy of Eleni Linos

At top American medical schools, mustaches hold more power than women.

In an effort to highlight the glass ceiling in medical education, a team of researchers looked at photographs of 1,018 department heads at the 50 medical schools receiving the most research funding from the National Institutes of Health.

They counted 137 women and 190 mustaches.

Mustaches outnumbered women in almost every specialty. The only fields where there were more female department heads than mustachioed ones were pediatrics, dermatology, and obstetrics and gynecology.

The field with the most mustaches was psychiatry. How does that make you feel?

The Chronicle talked to Eleni Linos, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and an author of the study, which appears in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q. Why mustaches?

A. We think mustaches are funny, and we wanted to find a comparison that was rare. We thought about using bow ties; we thought about looking at bald heads or red polka-dotted ties or other parts of these department leaders’ photos that were rare. Ultimately we just thought mustaches were the funniest.

Q. Which should we find more troubling: the lack of women in positions of leadership in medical education or the preponderance of mustachioed men?

A. We think the lack of women in leadership is worrying. On the other hand, the presence of facial hair and mustaches on men in positions of leadership is a strength of many departments that we should encourage. Definitely no worries about that. I personally have had many teachers and mentors over the years with mustaches, and I’m a big fan.

Q. In 1960, only 9 percent of American medical students were women. That number rose to around 50 percent by 2000, but it seems fair to assume that those who have been around long enough to have become department heads are from a generation of doctors that was male- and mustache-dominated. How do you handicap your findings in light of changing demographics in the medical field?

A. It’s true, our findings are limited by the fact that many leaders are older, and we couldn’t control just for age. But it doesn’t change the fact that women have been around and making up a big proportion of the medical community for decades now. And so we feel that it really is surprising and disappointing that there aren’t more female leaders in medicine.

Q. There’s an absence of female leaders in many professions. Are there reasons specific to the medical field that explain why there aren’t more women in charge?

A. Our data show that there is variation based on type of specialty. There are certain specialties that have fewer women — many of the surgical specialties, for example. There are several steps that department leaders can take to address these issues. In addition to policies that limit sexual harassment and allow for maternity leave, there are two really strong, evidence-based solutions that we make.

One is ensuring that people doing the hiring have well-defined, very specific hiring criteria. Unconscious bias is well documented: When interviewers and recruiters are making hiring decisions, they tend to favor the male candidate and then excuse or explain their decision in retrospect. Having very clear, a priori criteria makes them more likely to make a fair decision.

The second thing is that women are penalized for taking short breaks off for childbearing when jobs are structured in a way that reward long, continuous hours. So giving more control over where you work and how you work really helps women’s advancement.

Q. One of your measures was the “Mustache Index.” Can you explain what that is?

A. The Mustache Index is essentially a proportion of the number of women leaders to the number of leaders with a mustache. So, the higher the better.

Q. And you say all medical institutions should strive for a Mustache Index of at least one woman department head for every mustached department head. Do you think that over the next 10 years, the Mustache Index will rise or fall?

A. I would be happy to see the number of women go up independent of the Mustache Index. In fact, if we could get mustaches to go up in proportion to the number of women, I would be fine with that. But I think our real, serious message here is that we want more women leading medical departments.

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.