Courtney Schreiber’s career path set her up perfectly to become the new executive director at FOCUS on Health and Leadership for Women.
By Amanda Loudin
When Courtney Schreiber, MD, MPH, sat down with her ninth-grader to help with an English essay, it seemed like an ordinary mother-daughter moment. But it was also a very full-circle moment for Schreiber, the new executive director of the Perelman School of Medicine’s FOCUS on Health and Leadership for Women. “I received a phone call from a woman needing some urgent advice,” explains Schreiber, “so I stepped away from helping my daughter.”
After taking the call, Schreiber returned, apologetic for having left her daughter’s side. Rather than expressing disappointment, Schreiber’s daughter responded that she not only understood, but admired the mission of her mother’s work all the more seeing her in action. That mission – to improve the lives of women and elevate their position in society – goes back to Schreiber’s own childhood.
There’s little question that Schreiber developed that mission thanks to seeing her own parents in action. Her father, Alan D. Schreiber, MD, a professor emeritus of Medicine and assistant dean for research at the Perelman School, encouraged her from a young age to pursue medicine. “My father was very encouraging – he viewed academic medicine as a good career path for women, believing that women often make great clinicians, and in our ability to make important contribution to our fields,” Schreiber says. “My mother was a social worker who focused on patients with fertility issues. Between the influence of them both, I found my career path.”
That path has included the wearing of many hats at Penn, among them the Stuart and Emily Mudd Professor of Human Behavior and Reproduction; chief of family planning in the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology; founding director of PEACE, the Pregnancy Early Access Center; and since October, the executive director of FOCUS, which supports the advancement and leadership of women in academic medicine. She succeeds Stephanie Abbuhl, MD, GME’83, now an emeritus professor of Emergency Medicine, who led FOCUS for more than two decades.
In this latest role, Schreiber says, she is able to combine her micro and macro approach to supporting women in similar fields of work and health care in general. “When this opportunity came up, it gave me a megaphone about the importance of gender equality in health care, science, and the field of medicine,” she explains.
Schreiber views FOCUS as an organization with the ability to help shape the culture both within the medical school, and beyond its four walls. “We have amplified the expertise of our female colleagues and provided a stage for their contributions,” she says. “We also have data-driven initiatives to measure the proportion of female faculty that are recruited, retained, and promoted at PSOM. We’re looking at differences by race, ethnicity and gender to track our progress as an equitable institution compared to others across the country.”
Examples of this work in action include the FOCUS-led lunchtime seminar series, where female professors have presented on topics like “Microaggressions MACROIMPACT,” and “Addressing the Crisis of Children’s Mental Health,” which ran this fall via Zoom.
From where she stands, Schreiber says that academic medicine can learn a good deal from the business world. “They’ve made more progress integrating women into leadership roles than we have,” she says. “The numbers haven’t changed much in medical academia in over 20 years. With FOCUS, we are providing support and networks to those who need them most, and we hope to work collaboratively with all PSOM initiatives to apply an equity lens that harnesses the power of women-identified faculty.”
The pandemic is a good example of this mission at work, serving as an accelerator as inequities of all sorts became glaringly apparent. “The FOCUS team, together with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, received outside funding to award grants to faculty members with extenuating circumstances due to caregiving,” Schreiber explains. “This allows them to sustain their careers even with the systemic issues revealed during the pandemic.”
Looking forward, she says: “My hope, my belief, is PSOM can lead the way in sex and gender equity in the workforce, in health care, and in science. The time is now to overcome barriers and open our eyes to new points of view, new solutions. We will all be better for it.”