Closing the gap?—Trends in women’s full professorship at the medical faculty of the University of Rostock 1563–2018

This study analyses the representation of female full professors at the Medical Faculty of the University of Rostock (UMR) between 1563 and 2018 based on the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium, while also examining the career paths and personal background of the professors. The data for this study was acquired from the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium (CPR), a biographical online lexicon, the university archive and the statistical department of the University of Rostock. Descriptive Statistics, the Mann–Whitney-U-Test and the Kruskal–Wallis-Test for independent samples followed by pairwise comparison with Bonferroni correction were used to analyse differences between subgroups like epochs and male or female professors. The dataset includes 295 professors, 279 (94.57%) listed as male and 16 (5.42%) as female. There were no female full professors until 1964. While women are overrepresented in the lower ranks of academia, they remain underrepresented in the highest ranks: In 2018, 63.16% of students, 59.69% of the faculty’s graduates, 59.50% of newly graduated doctors and 33.33% of habilitations were women, while only 10.94% of professors at the UMR were female. In comparison, in 2018 female professors accounted for 23.69% of all professors in medicine in Germany. The first initiative for the promotion of women at the UMR mentioned in the archive files dates to 1962. The stomatological clinic was the first to create personalized development plans for women in academia and in total there were more female professors in orthodontics than male ones. Over the course of the study period, the proportion of female professors at the medical faculty increased noticeably, which is also reflected in a significant difference in appointment years between male and female professors (p < 0.001). In 1985, 9.76% of professors were women, while 55.90% of students were female. By 2024, these figures had risen to 18.31% of professors and 69.38% of students, respectively. Though significant progress has been made, further systematic changes are needed to achieve gender equity at the UMR. To make this possible, consequent initiatives by leaders, sufficient resources and continuous re-evaluation are needed.