Elevating the Experiences of Women in the Chest Medicine Community
March 10, 2023
CHEST leaders, Doreen Addrizzo-Harris, MD, FCCP; Carolyn D’Ambrosio, MD, FCCP; and Aneesa Das, MD, FCCP, recently sat down with Elizabeth J. Stigler, PhD, CHEST Director, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, for a discussion on CHEST’s new Women in Chest Medicine (WiCM) Interest Group—an evolution of the Women & Pulmonary Program, which has existed at CHEST since 2017.
The goal of WiCM is to provide a space where CHEST members can exchange resources, seek support, provide mentorship, gain knowledge, and share perspectives that broadly relate to the experiences of women in the chest medicine community (provider, patient, caregiver, and community members).
WiCM is built on three pillars:
- Professional Development: Empower members to confidently navigate their careers, develop leadership skills, and access and provide high-impact mentorship and sponsorship.
- Women’s Health Disparities: Increase efforts to drive awareness to the public on how certain diseases differentially affect women, both through the biology of sex and the social construct of gender, and how women patients can better advocate for themselves when working with clinicians to achieve optimum health.
- Well-being and Balance: Apply a holistic lens to well-being and issues of work/life balance that attends to the additional gendered labor that women perform (being mindful of the ways in which race, sexual orientation, ability, and other intersecting factors further compound this labor). Offer supportive tools and resources that encourage whole-self wellness.
Get involved with WiCM
Membership in WiCM is open to all CHEST members. Sign up, and we’ll reach out with information on future events and opportunities.