Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health

Introduction: Women remain underrepresented in emergency medicine leadership roles, in part due to sex-based stereotypes that undervalue leadership traits traditionally associated with women, such as collaboration and empathy. Agentic traits like assertiveness are often perceived as requisite for leadership, while communal skills are overlooked. Leadership self-efficacy, an individual’s belief in their ability to successfully perform leadership roles, is a key predictor of leadership emergence.

Methods: Our team developed a 90-minute didactic session featuring a panel of diverse women leaders followed by an interactive case-based exercise, delivered at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine 35th Annual Meeting in 2024. The intervention was evaluated using a pre- and postsurvey based on an adapted Leadership Self-Efficacy Scale measuring six domains of leadership self-efficacy. Eighteen participants completed both the pre- and postsession surveys, providing 18 matched pre–post pairs for analysis. Participants rated their confidence on a seven-point Likert scale. Our outcome of interest was the change in mean self-efficacy score for each domain on this seven-point scale, assessed with paired t-tests.

Results: All six leadership domains showed increased mean scores postintervention. Dimension 1 (Leading Change) increased significantly (mean change +0.72/7, P = .001), as did Dimension 2 (Choosing team/Delegating) (mean change +0.61/7, P = .004). Dimensions 3–6 showed positive but nonsignificant trends.

Conclusion: This single-session intervention was associated with increased leadership self-efficacy, particularly in the domains of leading change and team-building. The combination of role model exposure and interactive case practice may be a useful approach for empowering women physicians. This innovation can be adapted for implementation at other academic institutions.