Female Program Directors Positively Impact Diversity and Prestige of Orthopaedic Surgery Residency Programs

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to examine whether program director (PD) gender is associated with programs’ attending and resident diversity, as well as Doximity rankings.

Methods: The American Orthopaedic Association’s Orthopaedic Residency Information Network (ORIN) database was used to extract the percentages of Underrepresented in Medicine (URiM) attendings, female attendings, URiM residents, and female residents. Research and reputation rankings, as well as PD names were extracted from Doximity. PD gender was assessed by pronoun use on program websites or press releases. Programs were included if they had full diversity data, Doximity rankings, and pronoun use of PDs was identifiable. Two tailed T-tests were run to determine how PD gender influenced the diversity data and Doximity rankings.

Results: For the 122 programs meeting inclusion criteria, the average percentage of URiM attendings was 14, female attendings was 14, URiM residents was 19, and female residents was 21. Doximity rankings were between 1-206 with an average among all programs of 86 for reputation and 90 for research.

Seventeen programs (14%) had a female PD. Programs with a female PD had a significantly higher average percentage of female attendings (p < 0.00001), as well as Doximity reputation (p=0.002) and research rankings (p=0.01). Though the averages for percentage of female residents (p=0.06) and percentage of URiM residents (p=0.2) was higher among programs with female PDs, the difference was not significant. The average percentage of URiM attendings was the same among programs with female or male PDs (p=0.5).

Conclusion : Programs with female PDs had higher average percentage of female attendings, URiM residents, female residents, as well as Doximity reputation and research rankings. Orthopaedic surgery residency programs should implement strategies to address gender disparities among PDs which can not only increase diversity among their attendings and residents, but also positively impact the prestige of their programs.