Two recent Mount Sinai studies make abundantly clear the challenges faced by women who enter the field of gastroenterology. Among the inequities cited are persistent pay gaps, overt and unconscious bias that results in fewer professional and research opportunities for women, vulnerabilities during training, and under-representation at major conferences as panelists and keynote speakers.
While gastroenterology is historically a male-dominated field, the ranks of female professionals are growing. As many as 30 percent of trainees are now women, and in a recent gastroenterology fellowship program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, all 12 fellows were women.