Dr. Ngan F. Huang Co-Authors Research Study on
Career Advancement for Women in Academia

by Stanford CT Surgery Marketing Team
July 30, 2024

Ngan Huang, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford Medicine with an active research portfolio and a huge promoter of women’s advancement and an advocate of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is why she helps lead regenerative medicine and STEM conferences to introduce underrepresented students to these careers, and why she is on her department’s diversity committee. 

Dr. Huang has also spent the last four years serving on the Women’s Leadership Committee of the Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB) Council of the American Heart Association. The ATVB has one of the oldest and most active women’s leadership components among scientific organizations.

Dr. Huang and several other authors celebrated the publication of an important research paper on institutional support for career advancement for women faculty in science and academic medicine this July. “It has been exciting to be a part of this research project, where the goal was to find useful information for dissemination that could help people consider and improve women’s advancement at their academic institutions,” Dr. Huang says.

The paper acknowledges that there has been some improvement over the years at academic research institutions in gender disparities, including improved representation, access to resources, and some gender bias. Yet, it also found ongoing disparities.

The ATVB Women’s Leadership Committee interviewed key leaders of 12 academic institutions about their workplace’s status of women’s advancement. The paper identifies unique challenges women faculty face and strategies leaders use to promote advancement. The hope is that the article will serve as a catalyst for positive change that might include more robust support systems for women and policies to help women advance at academic institutions.

“When you cast common gender disparity issues in the academia light, they become more nuanced. For example, what does initiating better work-life integration and flex work hours look like in academia? Or how do we gain more transparency around pay differences?” Dr. Huang says.

Dr. Huang and Patricia Nguyen, MD, associate professor in cardiovascular medicine at Stanford, who is also on the ATVB Women’s Leadership Committee, interviewed Joseph Woo, MD, professor and chair of cardiothoracic surgery, as one of the featured leaders.

“We were excited to include him because he has made such remarkable progress toward the advancement of women in Stanford’s Cardiothoracic Surgery department. Before he started, seeing females in our department was rare. Nowadays, we have enough for a cohort to get together to network and receive social support,” Dr. Huang says.

The department’s faculty is a notable 23% women versus the national average of 8.3%, according to an Association of American Medical Colleges Physician Specialty Data Report in 2021. Undoubtedly, women at the senior leadership level drive positive changes to support women faculty.

The research study provides data on ten institutions, breaking down four areas of women advancement strategies, including community fostering, workshops and trainings, work-life integration, and culture and transparency. It then rates where each institution lands with implementation or planning of these strategies. The majority have gender-inclusive policies and bias-free evaluation processes, yet pay equity initiatives are not as prevalent.

“Something unexpected we found is that a lot of institutions are doing certain things well, like specific programs for gender equity, or coaching opportunities, but there is no one size fits all method, no magic algorithm,” Dr. Huang says.

The article includes a section that gives success stories, where leaders share their methods to advance women at their institutions. The next task for the ATVB is creating a toolkit to help others nationally and internationally implement effective strategies for women’s advancement.