Table 4.

Themes Related to How Women Choose Careers in Academic Medicine, Gleaned from Interviews with 53 Women Academic Physicians, 2010

Theme	Subthemes	Associated quotations
Change in specialty	--	[B]ecause when I decided to do a [specialty] fellowship, I did [this specialty] for [some] years and then I decided that I wanted to focus on [another specialty], and so I did [a] fellowship and then I was looking for a job [in this specialty]…most of the [positions in this specialty] are academic based…[My specialty] was kind of the reason for the choice.
Dissatisfaction with former career	--	I actually did private practice when I left residency for two years …it was not academically challenging or interesting to me…it was completely patient-care-focused with no educational or academic component to it.
Emotionality	Affinity	I think for a number of reasons…first I’ve always loved academics…I’ve loved research…I’ve loved teaching.
	Fear	I ask myself that question a lot…I think my reasons have changed over the years…I think initially it might have been fear-based…I wasn’t so sure about the business aspects of medicine…and when I went through [medical school, residency], there really weren’t any courses about the business of medicine…and that somewhat frightened me.
Parental influence	--	[Y]our parents always influence you in some regard…my parents are not academic…but they always put an emphasis on academic[s].
Decision-making styles	Serendipitous/Passive	- I kind of fell into it…when I finished up my training there was a job available at the academic hospital where I did my fellowship. So, it was just very convenient to stay [in] academic medicine.
		- [W]hen I completed residency and was looking for jobs, my residency program offered me a position on faculty and I wasn’t having a whole lot of luck at the time finding prospects, and I took the job and have been here ever since.
	Reflective/Intuitive	My path to [academic] medicine is a little bit different from other people’s…I came to [academic] medicine after already having a career in [another field in] education, so my background sort of led me to academics for the most part…I think I had a predisposition because I had already had an educational … background, and it … was a logical progression for me.
	Active/Planned	I knew all along I wanted to teach…but when I was a resident, I found that the best teachers were ones [who] actually had some clinical background or a reason for why they were teaching [in] the way [that] they were....the teachers [I] sort of avoided were the ones [who] went straight from residency into education…they just didn’t have the real word experience to impart…so my original plan was to go into private practice…which is what I did… for[some] years until a position opened up at the university.
	Foreclosure	- I’m not sure…that I made a conscious choice to choose academic medicine as a medical career…it was just that I never really thought about anything else …I actually never considered anything else.
		- I honestly never considered any other path…I think part of it was [that] during medical school and training my mentors were all in academic medicine and that was really what I was exposed to, and I loved it and really did not consider anything else.