This study is an attempt to identify gender differences among general cardiology fellowships and advanced cardiology fellowship programs in addition to other factors which may be associated with these differences.

• Disparities between female and male cardiologists already in practice are well known and have been widely reported in the cardiology literature1-7.

• This robust literature has discovered that much of these differences in compensation, workplace activities, and procedural focus often begins in residency and fellowship.

• Given the importance of fellowship in the differentiation of future cardiology practice, surprisingly little information is available on gender disparities in the context of cardiology fellowship, save for anecdotal descriptions and small studies of practicing cardiologists.

• Data from the American Medical Association Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database (FRIEDA) was collected from publicly available data on the FRIEDA website (updated in March 2017 for the 2017-2018 application cycle).

• Data was imported into Tableau 2019.1 for analysis and Prism 8.0.2 for statistical testing as appropriate.

Gender Differences in Cardiology and Advanced Cardiology FellowshipsKayle S. Shapero1 MD PhD and Peter A. Kahn1 MD MPH1Yale School of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine

• Of the general cardiology programs reporting gender composition data (n=77 of the total 207 programs), male fellows were noted to comprise 77.9% of the general cardiology fellowship population.

• In both electrophysiology (n=27 reporting of the total 103 programs) and interventional cardiology (n=43 reporting of the total 150 programs), failure male fellows comprised 90.6% of the advanced fellowship population. In Heart failure fellowships, (n= 11 of 70 reporting programs) female fellows represented 40.5%, on average, of the reporting programs.

• In general cardiology programs, those programs with a higher total percent of female faculty had great overall numbers of female trainees when compared to their peer programs (p=0.0311, Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Sign Rank Test, two tailed) while this difference was not statistically significant in electrophysiology (p=0.477) or interventional cardiology (p=0.275), heart failure (p =0.23).

Given the importance of fellowship training in establishing practice patters, these findings, along with other programmatic elements investigated suggest that additional measures are required to ensure that the cardiology workforce has appropriate female representation in the future.

1. Wenger NK. Women in cardiology: the US experience. Heart. 2005;91(3):277-279.2. Oza NM, Breathett K. Women in cardiology: fellows' perspective. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2015;65(9):951-953.3. Limacher MC, Zaher CA, Walsh MN, et al. The ACC professional life survey: career decisions of women and men in cardiology. A report of the Committee on Women in Cardiology. American College of Cardiology. J Am Coll Cardiol. 1998;32(3):827-835.4. Burgess S, Shaw E, Ellenberger K, Thomas L, Grines C, Zaman S. Women in Medicine: Addressing the Gender Gap in Interventional Cardiology. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2018;72(21):2663-2667.5. Moe TG. Pregnancy in fellowship: building a career and family. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2014;64(7):734-736.6. Warnes CA, Fedson SE, Foster E, et al. Working group 2: How to encourage more women to choose a career in cardiology. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2004;44(2):238-241.7. Lewis SJ, Mehta LS, Douglas PS, et al. Changes in the Professional Lives of Cardiologists Over 2 Decades. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2017;69(4):452-462.

Background

Methods

Objective

References

Conclusions

ResultsSpecialty Number of

programs

Number of programs reporting

gender data

Average fellowshipfemale %

Average male %

Average % of full time paid female

physician faculty

General Cardiology 207 77 21.3 77.9 16.9

Heart Failure 70 11 40.5 58.6 25.8

Electrophysiology 103 27 9 90.6 10.2

Interventional 150 43 9 90.6 5.8

Table 1. Total numbers of program and demographics by gender

Figure 1. Range and mean of female representation across reporting program for each specialty

General Cardiology

% F

emal

e Fa

culty

Interventional Cardiology

% F

emal

e Fa

culty

Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant

% F

emal

e Fa

culty

Electrophysiology

% F

emal

e Fa

culty

Figure 1. Range and mean of female faculty representation across reporting program for each specialty