Many doctors who leave Stanford are moving to comparable institutions and not to community clinics or purely research-oriented careers, according to a study by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. The study, conducted by surgery professor and Clayman research fellow Sherry Wren, was prompted in part by the fact that many physician scientists had left Stanford.

Wren’s initial hypothesis was that more female doctors were leaving their current jobs than male doctors because the medical field is particularly hard on women. The data from her survey of faculty who left between 1999 and 2009, however, suggests that the gender difference is small.

Gender did matter, however, when it came to doctors’ perception of how much support they were receiving in the workplace. Many of the female respondents said they felt they had less mentoring, protected research time and flexibility to accommodate new interests at Stanford. Some respondents claimed that they had little time for anything but clinical work, and their new institutions provided better opportunities in those areas.

Women, most of whom were assistant professors, left after an average of five years compared to men’s seven years. Approximately 42 percent of School of Medicine assistant professors are women and 22 percent are full professors.

In light of this data, Wren called for better career mentoring in order to improve faculty retention and recruitment.

Although the study covers nearly a decade, only half of those doctors responded to Wren’s questionnaire, making the data set too small for her to make broad generalizations. She and her team plan to eventually expand the survey throughout the University and to other medical schools.

–Ivy Nguyen