The SNU Women’s Medical Alumnae Association (SNUWMAA) was founded in 1973, and the graduation years of its current 1,636 members range from 1951 to 2018. It held an academic conference centered around a “Panel Discussion on the Hiring of Minority Faculty Members at National University Hospitals” on October 12th, 2019, at the Center for Medical Innovation in Seoul. Diversity Council chair Ki-Sun Hong participated in the panel, presenting on diversity at SNU with a focus on the gender, field, and university of origin of its faculty. She also mentioned that the diversity reports that the council has published annually for the past three years have not included statistics about faculty hired by the heads of university hospitals and that these figures should be collected. 

The panel discussion covered a variety of issues related to the hiring and promotion of female faculty at university hospitals. First, the panelists said it was necessary to understand the makeup of medical colleges’ faculty, which in addition to tenure-track faculty features many non-tenure-track faculty with unique job titles such as clinical faculty, treatment faculty, and clinical lecturers. They also confirmed that the issues of non-tenure-track faculty, gender among faculty, and the hiring of those who received their bachelor degree at a different institution work in complicated relation to one another. The problem of women “leaking” from the academic pipeline in the medical field, as can be seen by the lower numbers of female faculty versus female undergraduate or graduate students, was also mentioned, and it was emphasized that efforts must be made to find the cause of this problem and improve the field’s systems and culture. Several panelists and audience members also mentioned that the gender ratio in treatment-related subjects, and that in particular, the university hospital personnel system does not have mechanisms to address the difficulties that female faculty members face when their time as non-tenure-track faculty and their childbirth/childrearing years overlap. Finally, the point that the issue of developing and maintaining women’s excellence requires not individual efforts but structural support was underscored.