Interview with Miriam Bredella, Director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Faculty development by Juliet Isselbacher.

Will the current trends in publishing have lasting effects on women in science and medicine? How can employers help correct the course?

“This time is so critical. If you lose three months of your research, it’s very hard to submit grants and to be productive,” she said. “Once you drop out of the grant funding cycle, you don’t get your grants and it makes it harder and harder to to be successful again.”

Academia urgently needs to get ahead of that problem — and needs to do more going forward to push for gender parity, she said. That includes a radical rethinking of who is driving decision-making. 

“We have to have better representation of women in leadership and have more diversity. I think that is key so that we have women involved in critical decision-making,” she said. “I think it’s really important for women to feel integrated and supported. And this has to come from leadership.”

“You have to have options for work-family integration, you have to allow part-time working, allow remote working. And other things, simple things: Family-friendly meeting times — don’t have your meeting at six or seven o’clock when you maybe as a woman have to make dinner for the kids. Paid parental leave, lactation rooms.”

“We have a long, long way to go,” Bredella said. “But we are tackling it and there are a lot of initiatives so people are aware, which is the first part towards a solution.”