Women are underrepresented in med school leadership. A Drexel program has trained hundreds to run medical schools around the country.

When Drexel University launched a leadership course nearly three decades ago to prepare more women for top jobs at medical schools, officials hoped the program soon wouldn’t be necessary at all.

Then, in 1995, as now, women were underrepresented in deanships and other high-profile positions in academic medicine. The year before the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program began, women made up just 3% of the permanent deans at all American medical schools, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Today, women hold 28% of these positions.

“Thirty years ago, we thought we wouldn’t need ELAM today. We hoped that we would create equity and parity across medical schools and academic medicine,” said Nancy Spector, the program’s executive director and an ELAM alumna herself. “We are not there yet.”

But the Drexel program has prepared 1,300 women for leadership in academic medicine. These include two college presidents, 13 deans of public health schools, and 226 medical school deans around the country, including the current dean of Temple University’s Lewis M. Katz School of Medicine, Amy Goldberg.

ELAM turns 30 next year, and is larger than ever, with 95 fellows, Spector said. The university also runs a second course to train women who are interested in leading health systems.

The ELAM fellowship, which runs for a year, teaches participants financial skills, effective organizational dynamics for large medical schools, strategic decision-making, conflict resolution, and career planning.

For Goldberg, who is in her second year as dean at Temple, ELAM’s courses helped her to consider leadership roles she hadn’t previously. She was a trauma surgeon at Temple Hospital when she began her ELAM fellowship in 2005.

“It really built the foundation for me on which my leadership grew,” she said. “It was my first introduction into complex academic health centers, and I was educated on medical schools and their missions, health systems and their missions, and how they uniquely work with one another.”

Debra Furr-Holden, who heads the School of Global Public Health at New York University, entered her ELAM cohort in 2018.

The “hard skills” taught at ELAM, like learning how to manage the budgets and board membership of a major academic institution, are useful for mid-career academics considering higher levels of leadership, Furr-Holden said. “But the soft skills are transformative. I call it my lady mojo — I got my lady mojo at ELAM,” she said with a laugh.

Furr-Holden began the program when she was working as an interim program director at Michigan State University.

“Halfway through the program, I was like, ‘I’m better than this,’ ” she said. So she successfully created and pitched a new position to her bosses at the school. “I came out of ELAM a permanent director and an associate dean. That’s what you get at ELAM. Before, I would have never fought to create my own job,” she said.

Furr-Holden, who is Black, also appreciated conversations in the fellowship that tackled the unique problems that women of color face in medical leadership roles. “For me, being Black has had a much larger impact on my experience in the world than my gender has. We did some grappling over those issues, and it was a safe place to grapple.”

ELAM participants also become part of a tight-knit nationwide network of alumnae — jokingly called “elums” — who keep an eye out for professional opportunities for fellow graduates, helping younger alumnae navigate their career paths.

“It changed my life, in terms of opening up the possibilities for me, and thinking about what I might be capable of,” said Carolyn Meltzer, the dean of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

“In all organizations, there’s sort of the old boys’ network. This is the old girls’ network,” Meltzer said.

Spector said that ELAM’s goal is not just to equip women to navigate a male-dominated profession, but ultimately to change the nature of the system itself. For example, a lack of term limits in medical leadership roles means that there’s less turnover and fewer opportunities for advancement for aspiring deans and program directors from more diverse backgrounds, she said.

“We shouldn’t be fixing the women, we should be fixing our systems — and empowering people who come through to make change at our organizations,” she said.