Our memo brings together information that reflects the current thinking on how to progress Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace. Each month it is bursting with highlights for reflection and inspiration. Let us continue to work together to help influence social change, to achieve a safer and fairer society.
*Please note that this memo reflects the feelings and thoughts of your Diversity Committee. It is not meant to capture all the feelings within our Department. We openly recognize all may not agree. We do hope these memos help educate all of us about diversity issues and in addition invoke thoughtful and courteous discussion and debate*
~ The Pediatrics Diversity Committee
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Spring is here, finally and hopefully. There is much to celebrate as our plants start to bloom and the pollen hits us hard….
March is Women’s History Month. It is a time to honor the role of women in history. We suggest spending time reading about some of the very important women that have made incredible contributions to the world.
There are so many woman we could discuss that it is hard to single one out. One special stand out is Harriet Tubman who happens to have her birthday in March as well (at least according to one source, but we found various different dates for her birth). She was born March 10, 1880 as Aramina Ross, and lived for 93 years. Harriet Tubman was a former slave who worked with the underground railroad to save the lives of a countless number of slaves. She had many titles including: “Moses of her people” and “Conductor of the underground railroad”. She also had many roles in the Civil War: soldier, nurse, scout and spy. She was so adept at her roles that slaveowners put a bounty on her head of $40,000, dead or alive. Even after the war Harriet Tubman worked tirelessly to help others. She raised money to aid the freed slaves and was an intense advocate for woman’s suffrage.
Other amazing women you may want to read about include, but surely not limited to include: Dorthea Dix. Claudia Jones. Laura Cornelius Kellogg. Jane Cooke Wright. Elizabeth Cady Staton. Susan B. Anthony. Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Rosa Parks. Emmeline Parkhurst. Marie Cure. Florence Nightingale. Michelle Obama. Please create your own list of readings.
Other memorable dates for March include:
- 2nd Ash Wednesday – a Christian day of fasting and prayer that begins the season of Lent
- 8th International Women’s Day
- 17th St Patrick’s Day – with a great parade in Savannah
- 10th Holi – a Hindu holiday of the winter harvest
- 21st International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
Your Pediatrics Diversity Committee
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UPCOMING DIVERSITY TOWN HALL |
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Next Steps: Pediatric Climate Survey
Date: Thursday, April 7, 2022
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00p
Zoom Info:
Meeting ID: 980 2055 2152
Passcode: 076660
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Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, M.D., was born in New York City in 1929, but spent the majority of her early childhood in Puerto Rico.
After her family moved back to New York when she was 10, Rodriguez-Trias was faced with racism and discrimination as she grew up a Latina in the city — an experience that would shape the professional and personal activism throughout her life.
Rodriguez-Trias began her academic career in 1948 at the University of Puerto Rico, where she began to build her passion for activism, eventually becoming active within the campus’ Puerto Rican independence movement.
After returning to New York City, marrying and having three children, she decided to return to school to study medicine, a field that would allow the future physician to combine her two greatest passions: science and social justice.
In 1957, Rodriguez-Trias graduated from the University of Puerto Rico. Then in 1960, at the age of 31, she earned her medical degree from the university’s medical school. A short time later she gave birth to her fourth child.
During her residency, she founded Puerto Rico’s first care center for newborn babies. Three years later, the island’s child mortality rate had been halved.
Rodgriguez-Trias eventually returned to New York City in 1970, where she dove into community-based medicine at Lincoln Hospital, centered within a largely impoverished and undeserved Puerto Rican population of the South Bronx. There, she became the head of the pediatric unit.
During this time, Rodriguez-Trias became a prominent advocate within the women’s health movement, especially in the areas of reproductive rights and maternal health.
She worked to change the disproportionate sterilization of poor women, women of color, and women with disabilities — which was conducted not only at a much higher rate than their white, middle-class counterparts, but also often without consent.
Rodriguez-Triaswas was a founding member of both the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse.
Ultimately, Rodriguez-Trias’ work in this area led her to draft federal guidelines on sterilization, which required a woman’s consent to sterilization and required that they be offered in a language that they could fully understand.
In the 1980s, she served as the medical director of the New York State Department of Health of AIDS Institute, where she worked on behalf of women and children with HIV/AIDS.
Rodriguez-Trias became the first Latina to be elected president of the American Public Health Association in 1993.
Honoring her lifetime of work expanding access to public health services for women and children in minority and low-income populations across the United States — and around the world — Rodrigues-Trias received a Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001.
She passed away from cancer several months later at the age of 72.
“No one is going to have a quality of life unless we support everyone’s quality of life… Not on a basis of do-goodism, but because of a real commitment… it’s our collective and personal health that’s at stake.” —Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias
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By: Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., Elena Fuentes-Afflick, M.D., M.P.H. and Eve Higginbotham, M.D., M.L.
Just as the Covid-19 pandemic began to affect the United States in early 2020, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) published a report detailing practices for addressing long-standing issues that have led to the underrepresentation of women in influential positions in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). The report emphasized the ways in which cultural differences among disciplines and issues related to intersectionality contribute to the complexity associated with confronting gender inequity and to the lack of women in these fields. The tenuous position of women in medicine — including a relative lack of progress over 35 years — has since been confirmed. Given the past year’s understandably urgent focus on clinical and research efforts related to Covid-19, attention has seemingly turned away from work aimed at promoting gender equity, diversity, and inclusion.
There is growing evidence that pandemic-associated disruptions have had a disproportionate effect on women’s personal and professional lives and could have lasting, negative consequences for their career trajectories. In 2021, the NASEM released a new report focusing on Covid-19 and the careers of women in STEMM (on which we were coauthors), which also uses an intersectional lens and highlights the layering of social stressors that have affected women of color and women who are members of other marginalized groups. Moving forward, we believe it will be important to continue to examine leadership decisions and new roles created because of the pandemic that may have widened the gender gap in academic medicine.
The disruptions associated with the pandemic have presented both challenges and opportunities for ensuring equity and reaping the benefits of diversity. One important challenge has been increased caregiving needs, both in the workplace and at home. These demands have exacerbated a preexisting barrier to women’s professional advancement, given societal expectations that women serve as caregivers and professional norms that inadequately value caregiving-related contributions.
Gender-based differences in the time that academic physicians dedicate to parenting and other extraprofessional caregiving responsibilities existed before the pandemic closed schools and childcare facilities and increased older adults’ needs. Differences in caregiving roles in the workplace have also existed for decades, as evidenced by women’s disproportionate representation as nontenured clinicians rather than as tenure-track faculty in academic medicine. Since the onset of the pandemic, the needs of family members, patients, students, and colleagues have been met by the admirable reallocation of efforts by many people in academic medicine. Unsurprisingly, given the outsize role that women have historically played as caregivers, women appear to have been particularly affected by these abrupt shifts, as measured by work-time allocation and outcomes ranging from traditional academic-productivity indicators such as publications to well-being and mental health. Read More
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By: Olivia Campbell
For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care.
In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.
Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.
With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.
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We are in the process of developing sub-committees to further our work, expedite our cause, and make it possible for more people to be involved. Your beliefs do not need to be the same as that of the current committee. If you are interested, please let us know which committee would be of interest to you. If you have an area of interest that is not listed, please make that known. The topics for these sub-committees may grow, shrink, or disappear. Please send an email to peds_diversity@med.unc.edu if you are interested in joining.
Our sub-committees to date will include:
- Pediatric Student Curriculum
- Pediatric Resident Curriculum
- Pediatric Fellow Curriculum
- Town Hall and Grand Round Topics
- Advocacy for our Hispanic Population
- Advocacy for our Native American Population
- Promotion Diversity Statements
- Clinical Care
- Mentorship of UIM in Pediatrics
- Exit Interviews
- Wellness
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March 5 @ 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Hooker Fields 203 South Road, Chapel Hill, NC
The Carolina Indian Circle will host the 35th Annual Powwow. This year's theme is "Reclaiming Our Space." The event will feature cultural dances, and vendors will sell food and Native American crafts. Grounds open at 10 a.m. and Grand Entry … Continued
March 24 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Hybrid
The land we now know as North Carolina has one of the largest Indigenous populations in the United States, and many tribal nations call this land home. Indigenous peoples are the original stewards of the landscapes and waterways of this … Continued
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Reoccuring Events/Resources:
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Underrepresented in Medicine Community List
The purpose of the Underrepresented in Medicine Community List is to allow students, staff, residents, and faculty of underrepresented identities that are affiliated with the UNC School of Medicine to find community, mentorship, and representation. Such identities include those belonging to non-dominant religions, races or ethnicities, and sexualities or gender identities.
This community is open and accessible to anyone with a UNC Onyen and password, including current staff, faculty, students, residents, and fellows.
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March Dates to Note
Other important dates can be found on the
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March 8 - International Women's Day
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March 17 – St. Patrick's Day
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March 21 – World Down Syndrome Day
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March 25 - International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
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March 31 - International Transgender Day of Visibility
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Dates to Note is a compilation intended to include, but is not all-inclusive, notable information from the internet, Diversity Best Practices, 2021 Diversity Holiday Calendar, and other sources. |
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Stuart Gold, MD - Committee Chair |
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Alessandra Angelino, MD
Benny Joyner, MD
Christel Wekon-kemeni, MD
Christian Lawrence, MD
Denita Moore
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Gretter Benitez, MD
Jennifer Gutierrez-Wu, MD
Jennifer McElroy
Kenya McNeal-Trice, MD
Martha Perry, MD
Jen Fuchs, MD
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Nikki Ferrin, MD
Nina Jain, MD
Robin Howard
Steven Weinberg, MD
Zachary Pettigrew, MD
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