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Prof. Helena Teede
When Professor Helena Teede was challenged to flip traditional perceptions of leadership and power that valued authority and control to one that promoted engagement, impact and influence, it marked the start of an extraordinary leadership career across the medical profession, including across research and in her own clinical practice.
Last week the esteemed endocrinologist and Director of the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation (MCHRI) received the prestigious Endocrine Society 2021 Laureate Awards in the category of Outstanding Leadership in Endocrinology.
The international Award recognises her remarkable contribution to the field of Women’s Health and her role in advancing leadership for women in health care.
A senior endocrinologist at Monash Health, Professor Teede also holds many leadership roles across healthcare and is a past President of the Endocrine Society of Australia.
Here she talks to the limbic about the work being done to improve career opportunities for women in medicine and how she’s using an evidence based approach to make real change.
“There has been so much activity in supporting women in medicine but what we know is most of it is not evidence based and a lot of it is not effective. We see everyone in the hamster wheel trying to make a difference, ticking boxes that target women at an individual level but not really committing to strategies that are going to make a difference.”
Barriers to leadership?
A critical factor missing, she says, is not just the lack of evidence but the capacity to audit and measure feedback and efficacy around those strategies.
For the past six years Professor Teede has been running leadership programs to promote the advancement of women in medicine. Describing leadership as the ‘motivation for influence and impact’, she says the barriers stopping women from building influence come down to three themes – capacity, capability and credibility.
“Women have the burden of being responsible for too many other things outside work that they don’t have enough support in to be able to really focus,” she says, particularly referencing caring roles whether that be as parents or as those responsible for the care of other family members.
“It’s about how women structure their own environment and we provide the social support around women to give them that capacity.”
Professor Teede also points out that many women often don’t perceive they have the capability to stand up for roles until they’re ‘well and truly’ qualified and instead need to be sponsored and mentored into them.
And perhaps the biggest barrier to advancing women’s careers in medicine remains that women aren’t considered credible leaders. She says unconscious bias persists despite women performing equally to male peers on measures of medical knowledge, communication skills, professionalism, technical skills, practice-based learning and clinical judgment.
“I’ve watched people struggle in this space wanting to do things for so long. I’ve seen a lot of passion and sometimes non-constructive engagement, blaming and alienating male colleagues when a lot of this isn’t about women and men.”
For Professor Teede it’s about the socially constructed idea of traditional masculinity.
“What we often see as a more traditionally male paradigm of success, especially in medicine, is that the loudest, most egotistical, most confident person rises to the top.”
It’s a paradigm that penalises both the women and men who don’t identify with those leadership models, she adds.
Room at the top
While women make up more than half of medical students and trainees, women account for less than 30% of registered physicians and an even smaller proportion of clinical leadership positions, observes Professor Teede.
Meanwhile just 13.5% of CEOs in major hospitals are female, despite women making up the vast majority of hospital staff, she said recalling her own experience.