Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in rheumatology research and academic medicine, and institutional and individual action is needed to overcome these disparities.
A Sunday, October 26, session at ACR Convergence will highlight strategies for improving inclusion of traditionally underrepresented groups at all levels of academic medicine, from research participants to academic teams.
“We want to highlight the fact that we recognize and acknowledge that disparities exist among research and clinical medicine investigators and clinician-scientists, and possible strategies to address those disparities,” said Edith Williams, PhD.
Sponsoring Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Team Science and Clinical Practice will take place from 10–11:30 a.m. in Room W375A of McCormick Place. On-demand access to recorded presentations will be available to registered attendees of ACR Convergence following the annual meeting through October 31, 2026.
Dr. Williams, Director of the Center for Community Health & Prevention, Director of the Office of Health Equity Research, and the Dean’s Professor of Health Equity Research, Rochester Medical Center, will explore practical solutions to promoting diversity in clinical trials.
“It’s thinking creatively about the way we’re going about trying to recruit study personnel, having conversations with our institutional review boards about how we’re compensating our participants, being part of tenure and promotion committees, and having conversations with chairs and deans about some of those activities that don’t always necessarily make it into performative criteria, like building community partnerships and various community engagement activities,” she said.
Investigators should also examine their recruitment strategies to diversify study teams and consider not just who should comprise the research team, but also the best places to position advertising to attract people to fill the roles of study coordinators, project managers, and similar positions. For instance, Dr. Williams aims to study the transitional space between pediatric and adult care for people living with lupus.
“We want to target those with the worst health outcomes, which are primarily younger African American women, so I want members of my study team to be relatable to that population,” Dr. Williams explained. “If I try to recruit younger women of color to be part of my study team, I’m probably not going to put an ad in the newspaper. I’m going to go to social media. And maybe I’m going to go to networks around our historically Black colleges for fresh graduates in health science programs.”
In medical research, addressing disparities will require moving past outdated and oversimplistic group categorizations.
“It’s often discussed that people are not included in research or in medical practice because of structural barriers that limit their access,” said Paula Ramos, PhD. “This can be because of socioeconomic factors like income, education, or the rural-urban divide, and also lack of trust or potential stigma from having been discriminated against before by the health system.”
Dr. Ramos, Associate Professor at Emory University School of Medicine, will address some of the lesser-discussed factors that hinder diversity in medical research. One is ambiguous language that fails to accurately describe ethnic and racial groups or to distinguish genetically defined groups. Consequently, race and genetic ancestry are often mistaken for one another in published study results.
“Many people assume that race can be genetically defined, which it cannot,” Dr. Ramos said. “That’s one of the issues with a lack of rigorous language and conflation of terms that further stigmatizes people and contributes to health disparities. There’s a similar issue in the reporting of sex in research, because it’s often assumed that sex has a single definition and is very clear at birth and dichotomous (female or male). But that’s not true.”
There is no universal agreement on the definition of sex. While sex can be defined based on external genitalia at birth, it can also be defined by the presence of sex chromosomes, organ inventories, or by hormone levels, and which defining characteristics are being used in research need to be explained in studies to truly understand and include the spectrum of human diversity, Dr. Ramos noted.
“There is a need for clear and rigorous language that will mitigate the current propagation of concepts that are outdated and wrong, that are simplistic and reductionistic,” she said. “To fully achieve inclusion of all, we need to be more rigorous and responsible in how we write our papers and how we disseminate our research findings.”
Sheetal Desai, MD, will address how to implement clinical practice and institutional changes to support inclusion of women and minorities in medicine and in leadership. Dr. Desai is Chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Director of the Lupus Clinic, and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine.
Don’t Miss a Session
If you weren’t able to make it to a live session during ACR Convergence 2025 — or you want to revisit a session from the annual meeting — make plans to watch the replay. All registered participants receive on-demand access to scientific sessions after the meeting through October 31, 2026.