Teachers can close gender gap in classroom leadership during medical school, study finds

UCLA Newsroom
By Elaine Schmidt July 28, 2010

Half of first-year medical students in the U.S. are women, yet a new UCLA study shows that they volunteer for leadership roles in the classroom significantly less than their male counterparts. Subtle encouragement from teachers, however, can even out the playing field by boosting female students' willingness to identify themselves as leaders.

"People assume that if you have parity in the numbers of men and women training to become physicians, then everything else will fall into place," said Nancy Wayne, a professor of physiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and lead author of the study. "Surprisingly, we found that wasn't the case."

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