On Diversity Recruiting Efforts and Career Recovery From COVID-19
By Mario
Our nation’s history is far from perfect. Looking back over the last 250 years, the United States has fought an enduring and complicated battle to advance equal rights for all. The course has rarely followed a linear path. More recently, however, our society has come to realize that equal rights alone are not enough–there has to be equal opportunity for all to succeed. Equal opportunity can not only create a fair playing field , it also can lead to a workforce that is more reflective and representative of our increasingly diverse society. I’ve certainly seen that first hand: access to that equal opportunity is what created the pathway for the last three generations of my family to pursue careers in medicine.
As a physician myself, I recognize that access to equal opportunity is a challenge that has faced the field of medicine for too long. Up until around the time I started my own training–circa early 2000s– our physician workforce was dominated by white men with a characteristically paternalistic approach to medical care and research priorities in the field. Consequently, what we ended up with was a medical system that was difficult for many of our patients to relate to and whose research priorities did not adequately represent the diversity across the country.
The 2000s, however, marked the start of intensive efforts within the academic medical community to address these shortcomings. Outreach to underrepresented communities - focused on race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status - sought to build a physician pipeline and workforce that valued equal opportunity as it is and better outcomes for all. Over the last 30 years, good progress has been made, though much work remains to be done.
It was with great interest, then, that I read a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Open Network, Association of the COVID-19 Pandemic with Medical School Diversity Pathway Programs. Through a survey of medical schools and program administrators, the researchers were able to find that the COVID-19 pandemic had a detrimental effect on medical school diversity pathways that are designed to expose students in elementary, middle, and high school to the research and shadowing experiences that help drive an interest in the medical profession. The pandemic also disproportionately affected students of color with inadequate internet access who could not tap into the online versions of these programs. The findings themselves were not that surprising–educational experiences for students of all ages and backgrounds were disrupted by COVID-19.
It does, however, force a more interesting question for those working to create employment and upward mobility opportunities for young people: how should we prioritize our interventions to ensure that professionals in specialized careers, including medicine, continue to diversify in the years ahead? Do we generate a more efficient return on the investment when we target programs like at high school and college aged-students who may already be on a particular career trajectory? Or, do we need to be more intentional in the post-pandemic recovery period about reconstituting these STEM diversity pathways earlier in the educational pathway to help broaden the intake funnel across all professions in order to develop a more representative workforce?
This is a complex question without easy answers. As the country teeters on an economic recession and faces the potential of more limited resources, our answer cannot simply be to spend more ad infinitum. We may, in fact, be headed for more austere times that require a greater emphasis on particular priorities. The hardest question, of course, is how do we decide which of these programs to invest in–across all professions–to help build the workforce that America needs for an increasingly competitive world?
I’m not sure that answer is clear yet. The COVID-19 pandemic has created deep fissures in our society that will take time and intentional efforts to heal. It has forced the closure of critical diversity recruitment programs like those identified in the JAMA Open Network paper . But my hope, as COVID-19 wanes and we look to resume a more normal operating state, is that we will reconstitute programs like these early in our efforts to ensure that equal opportunity for all remains the bedrock upon which that healing can occur.