{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.042066909572706195, 'fraction_numerical': 0.038092083471348126, 'mean_word_length': 5.101010101010101, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Gender diversity in microsurgery academic faculty across the United States

Gender diversity in plastic surgery lags behind many medical specialties among faculty members.(Chawla et al., 2021) It has been shown that an increased number of diversity among employees improves productivity and innovation. Despite significant evidence in favor of diversity in leadership, female presence in high-ranking positions in medicine is lacking across multiple specialties. Although the number of female plastic surgery residents rose in mid-2000s, the same phenomenon was not seen beyond the residency level.(Danko & Cheng, 2021; Keane et al., 2021) In 2020, a cross sectional analysis of academic plastic surgeons found that men were more likely to be professors and held more leadership positions than women.(Obeid et al., 2017) Similarly, a 2021 study on gender diversity among hand surgery faculty members revealed the lack of diversity among one of plastic surgery subspecialties, with only 15% of faculty members being women.(Grandizio et al., 2021) In this article, we aim to evaluate gender disparity among faculty across microsurgery fellowship programs in the United States by comparing the disparities among total number of faculty, program directors (PD's), years in practice and academic rank. In March 2022, gender representation in the field of microsurgery among faculty members was obtained from the American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery website and the academic program's respective websites. Our sample included 185 subjects from 32 microsurgery fellowship programs in the United States from which we collected name, gender, position, and year of graduation for every faculty member. Nonphysician members were excluded. Categorical variables were analyzed using chi-squared tests and continuous variables by Student's t-tests or ANOVA. All p-values were two-tailed, and analysis was conducted using SAS version 9.4. We identified 185 microsurgeons, 29 (15.7%) were classified as female and 156 (84.3%) as male (p < .0001). Among the 32 fellowship program directors, only 3 (9.4%) were identified as female. Faculty members were further subdivided by academic rank. A significant difference was found between the number of male and female faculty among all academic positions (p < .0001). A total of 61 professors were identified, from which 2 (3.3%) were female. Among 61 associate professors identified, 9 (14.8%) identified as female. Similarly, 63 assistant professors were identified, with 18 (28.6%) identified as female (Table 1). Years in practice after completion of terminal training was analyzed across the academic faculty. There was a significant difference in the number of male and female faculty members across all experience levels (p < .0001). Among faculty members with less than 10 years since completion of terminal training (55), 14 (25.5%) of them were classified as female. For faculty who have 10–20 years after graduation (80), 13 (16.3%) identified as female. Among faculty