xRead - Mentorship in Otolaryngology Trainees (March 2026)

DeSisto et al.

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both sales and profits. 30 The importance of gender diver sity, women mentorship, and women representation cannot be understated, and academic medicine should continue to focus on strategies to improve gender diversity. There has been a significant amount of interest in the cause of inadequate promotion and retention of women. One hypothesis is the lack of adequate executive-level spon sorship, which inhibits high-achieving women from advanc ing into the highest leadership positions. 31 In medicine, lack of woman role models, decreased research productivity, harassment, and burnout have been cited as reasons for fewer women in these positions. 4,6,32-34 When women in aca demic leadership positions are asked to examine their own experience with tenure and promotion, the most common reasons for gender disparities are poorly defined goals, lack of standard promotion procedures, and vulnerability to dis crimination. 34 Successful women also emphasize the per ception that their male counterparts experience advancement differently. 34 Gender discrimination has been reported by 65.1% of women residents, who also report more frequent feelings of fatigue and burnout than men. 6,34 Numerous organizations have aimed to improve upon these disparities with targeted mentorship and leadership programs. A recent systematic review of mentorship pro gram implementation found these programs were consis tently highly rated, with one program reporting an 85% retention rate for participating woman faculty. 35 Additional programs also report improvement in retention and recruit ment into the department or specialty, highlighting the impact that formalized mentorship programs can have on women in academic medicine. 35 In 2017, the Society of General Internal Medicine successfully implemented the novel Career Advising Program, a longitudinal experience intended to foster the advancement of women in academic medicine by assisting woman faculty in the navigation of the academic promotion process. 36 The success of this and other mentorship programs highlights the impact of men torship and sponsorship on increasing representation, retention, and promotion of women. Although we are aware of several mentorship programs within OHNS that aim to promote the advancement of women in the spe cialty, to our knowledge, no studies examining the impact of these initiatives have been published. We have recently implemented a Women in Otolaryngology leadership and mentorship curriculum for female residents within our institution and aim to publish on the effectiveness of this program. Future research on the impact of mentorship pro grams focused on women in OHNS is needed. There are several limitations to our study. First, this is a cross-sectional study of current OHNS residency pro grams, which limits our analysis to a snapshot in time rather than an analysis of trends. The current study design also limits conclusions on causation and does not ade quately assess the career motivations of residency program

late-career level remains. OHNS department chairs appointed within the past 6 years have an average of 18 years of post-residency/fellowship experience, result ing in a significant time lag between initial faculty mem bership and department chair appointment. 13 Consequently, the increase in the number of OHNS residents and faculty over the past decade should result in growth at the highest leadership levels in the coming years. It is also important to consider differences in attrition rates between male and female surgeons. Recent research has demonstrated that women are up to 2 times more likely to leave academic surgery departments compared to men. 24 Although this has not been explored in OHNS specifically, it is likely that increased attrition rates among women in OHNS may impact the gender diversity seen at higher academic lead ership ranks. Future research on factors impacting the retention of women in OHNS is needed. Gender diversity in OHNS subspecialties is also vari able. A recent query of 1421 members of the American Academy of Facial Plastic Surgery (AAFPRS) found 13.0% of members to be female compared to 86.9% male. 25 A similar study demonstrated that women more frequently apply for pediatric otolaryngology fellowship positions and less frequently for head and neck fellowship positions, with women fellowship applicants outnumber ing men only in pediatric otolaryngology. 26 In addition, women account for only 12% of society leaders and 17.7% of editorial board members for major Otolaryngology journals. 3,27 However, despite some persistent discrepan cies in the number of woman subspecialty surgeons, there has been an increase in gender diversity from 3% of Head and Neck fellowship graduates in 2008 to 33% in 2018. 28 Gender diversity and the availability of role models who are women may significantly impact diverse recruit ment and overall organizational success in both medicine and business. Recent literature has demonstrated that women value and understand the importance of same-sex mentorship at a rate higher than their male counterparts. 7 Women medical students are more likely to specialize in OHNS when their medical school has at least some full time women faculty and enter residency programs with higher proportions of women residents. 9 Data from the urology match confirms this finding, with there being a statistically significant correlation between the proportion of matched women applications and the proportion of women faculty. 20 The impact of female representation on organizational success has also been well demonstrated in the areas of finance and business. Women in C-suite posi tions catalyze fundamental shifts in tolerance, openness to change, and creation strategies, with companies having strong woman leadership generating a return on equity of 10.1% per year compared to 7.4% for those without. 29,30 In fact, field experiments have found that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated teams in