A 5-Year, Multi-Institutional Mentorship Program in Radiation Oncology: The Society for Women in Radiation Oncology Experience.

PURPOSE

Mentorship in the field of radiation oncology (RO) promotes career development and satisfaction. Many individuals, however, do not have access to mentorship or are unsatisfied with their mentorship experience, potentially because of insufficient gender-concordant mentorship opportunities. To address this, the Society for Women in Radiation Oncology (SWRO) created the SWRO Mentorship Program for women, gender minorities, and those with intersecting marginalized identities at all stages of training for physicians and medical physicists. We present the 5-year experience of the largest multi-institutional mentorship program, to our knowledge, in RO.

METHODS AND MATERIALS

Publicly available information and the SWRO mentorship sign-up forms were used. Descriptive statistics and binomial tests compared with reference points were conducted.

RESULTS

Between January 2018 and June 2023, 296 individuals from 19 countries participated in the mentorship program, generating 225 mentee-mentor pairs. The majority were women (89.2%), based in the United States (US; 84.8%), and on the physician track (96.6%). The remainder of the analysis focused on US-based, physician-track participants (n = 244), the majority of whom were women (96.7%) and trainees (58.2%). Among those who have completed RO residency, most accepted a first job in academia (82.1%) and remained in academia at the time of the analysis (76.3%). A significantly higher proportion of SWRO mentorship participants compared with the reference point took a first job in academia (82.1% vs 58.3%; P < .0001). The most common disease sites of focus for the physician-track trainees who finished residency are breast (50.4%), central nervous system (32.7%), and gynecologic malignancies (30.1%), with 54% listing more than 1. The most commonly expressed goals of mentorship are research (35.8%), leadership (24.5%), and building connections within a specific geography or institution (19.2%).

CONCLUSIONS

The SWRO experience demonstrates the feasibility of a large-scale, multi-institutional mentorship program in RO.