Judith A. Salerno, MD, MS, on Supporting Women as Leaders in Medicine
As a leader in public health, Dr. Salerno discusses how we can support women leaders and the responsibility they have to serve as role models
Judith A. Salerno, MD, MS, president of The New York Academy of Medicine, is a leader in medicine who unconventionally started her career in public health before pursuing medicine.
“I have loved being a part of both worlds and I don't see them as distinctly different as others do,” shared Dr. Salerno. “When I went into medicine, I had that lens of population health to guide me. I think that there’s so much that’s complementary between them, and so much necessity in looking at the individual through the community and population perspective.”
Prior to joining NYAM, Dr. Salerno was President and Chief Executive Officer of Susan G. Komen™, the world’s largest breast cancer organization. This experience helped her to recognize that many issues specific to women needed to rise as important policy and population health issues: “My work in breast cancer highlighted the fact that if you’re a Black woman, you’re 40% more likely to die of breast cancer. This is a number that has always been and always will be unacceptable until we fix it.”
One of the ways to create authentic and productive change is to elevate more women into leadership positions in medicine as well as in public health. “We’re now up to over half of medical school classes being women, but the outsized role of women is not reflected in leadership positions by and large,” said Dr. Salerno.
Supporting Women as Women
To make the shift at the top, Dr. Salerno argues that institutions need to be able to support women's ability to manage their lives better.
“The stories that we’re hearing right now are about the women who are schooling their kids at home, taking care of the house, and working through Zoom in that same household. It’s a three-ring circus and all managed by women because women are the only ones who can handle a three-ring circus,” she said.
While these challenges affect their ability to move into leadership roles, they also affect women’s health. “There are direct issues about the stress involved with these enormous responsibilities that relate to women's health, and we need to pay more attention to them,” Dr. Salerno said.
The younger generations have already noticed. Dr. Salerno recently attended a mentoring event and after introducing her areas of expertise, she included that she’s also a single mother of three children and offered to discuss what it's like to juggle a research career, a clinical career, and a family on her own.
What she found when she got to her breakout table was a swarm of young women asking her about her life. “I was stunned because I had gone into this conversation ready to talk about my Alzheimer's research and wound up discussing ‘How can we do it?’ and ‘How do we support each other?’”
Too often, women don’t feel they’re able to talk openly about the challenges they're facing—and that’s a big problem.
“I think that we have been hampered by our inability to talk about these needs in a forthright manner because of fear that we would somehow be disadvantaged,” Dr. Salerno said. “But we have to support these conversations and get to what the real needs are.”
Dr. Salerno suggests that there are many things institutions can do to support women rising in the ranks, from exploring different career trajectories to supporting working mothers as well as women who may be caregivers to elderly parents.
“When I was an early career physician with three young children, I accepted the fact that it was all on me, but I think that young women today are looking for solutions rather than accepting this as a way of working,” she said. “I see changes; they're slow in coming, but they’re important changes and I hope they’ll be lasting.”
On Leadership
Dr. Salerno noted that leadership isn’t just about policy; it’s also about serving as a role model.
“I think that the reason that I didn't go into medicine until I was thirty years old was because I didn't have the role models,” she said. “As leaders, we each have to be acutely aware of the fact that we are a role model to the next generation. I consider it a great but welcome responsibility.”
In fact, she’d prefer to be seen as a mentor than a leader. “People look up to you and value your opinion,” she said. “That means you have to make sure you’re careful and thoughtful in how you deliver advice.”
She added: “I also think that we have to proactively lift people up who might not otherwise see themselves in these roles and give them the ability to imagine themselves as a doctor, a surgeon, a department head, or a public health commissioner. Then put the institutional support in place for them to go do it.”
There are now more women entering medical school than men. But that doesn't mean our work is done. To achieve our best future, women need to be active in leadership roles across the industry from academics, to healthcare, to research. In this series, the Foundation talks to leaders in medicine to get their perspective on how we move forward building on the strides we've already taken.