The End of an Era - and the Complicated Future of Women's Leadership Programs

This week the country's premier program to train female leaders in academic medicine had to make a difficult decision - admit men or cease to exist.

This week, I learned during my final session of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) program that they would be opening their doors to men next year. Program leadership had been informed that the program was not compliant with Title VI regulations. They were informed they could admit men or close their doors. For those not familiar with ELAM, it is the country’s premier training program to help women ascend to leadership positions such as department chairs and deans at medical schools across the country. They also recently expanded to include leadership programs for health system executives as well.

But ELAM is not the only program that has been impacted. Across the country, women’s leadership initiatives and affinity-based programs have come under legal attack or been dismantled. At NASA, diversity, equity, and inclusion references—including those supporting women in leadership—were ordered to be stripped from public materials following new federal directives. At West Point, the U.S. Military Academy disbanded a dozen cadet affinity clubs, including the Corbin Forum, a long-standing leadership group for women cadets, as part of a broader rollback of diversity initiatives in federal institutions. Programs designed to address historical inequities are now being reframed as discriminatory under new interpretations of Title VI and Title IX, regardless of the systemic barriers that remain.

These changes come as part of a larger, coordinated narrative that treats attempts to level the playing field as suspect, and sees the existence of any women-focused or minority-focused leadership efforts as inherently problematic. The implications for leadership development—and for the future of equity itself—are profound. History teaches us that progress toward equity is rarely linear. Gains are often followed by periods of retrenchment—times when hard-won advances are challenged, reinterpreted, or quietly dismantled. What we are witnessing now is part of that familiar pattern: a reminder that the work of building inclusion has always been met with resistance.

I will admit that I have conflicted feelings. On one hand, I believe deeply that women and other groups deserve spaces built for them, especially given the hardships we have faced in rising through the ranks in multiple fields. Programs like ELAM were never about exclusion for its own sake; they were about survival and advancement in a system that, for too long, had simply assumed leadership didn’t belong to us. To be told now that women can no longer assemble for the purpose of empowering themselves feels like a betrayal of the very history that made programs like this necessary. There is a reason leadership programs for women existed in the first place. On the other hand, I also believe that there are many potential benefits to leadership training programs that combine men and women.

Why These Programs Exist: The Leaky Pipeline

When ELAM was founded, the case for women’s leadership programs was heartbreakingly clear. Despite women making significant strides into the ranks of medical school and early academic positions, few rose into true positions of power. The numbers have improved, but they remain stark even now. Women account for more than half of all medical students in the United States, but only 18 percent of department chairs and medical school deans. Each step up the ladder sees more women disappear. The “leaky pipeline” remains very much intact, dripping away the leadership potential of women through structural inequities, bias in hiring and promotion, and the persistent burdens of invisible labor.

Leadership development programs created decades ago were never built with women in mind. The informal mentorships, the old boys’ clubs, the assumed pathways upward—they were all designed to serve a narrow demographic. ELAM was built to intervene: to provide women not just with skills and leadership training, but with the confidence and community to withstand the long erosion of institutional neglect. It wasn’t a gift. It was a necessary act of recalibration.

How Successful They've Been

The success of ELAM is real. ELAM graduates now number over 1,500 and serve in numerous leadership positions – department head through university president – at 300 U.S. and Canadian academic health centers. These women have altered the landscape—not just by taking their places at the table, but by mentoring others, shifting policies, and creating more inclusive cultures that ripple far beyond their own careers. For many of us, the value of ELAM has extended beyond professional milestones. It has offered a rare kind of solidarity—a space where ambition didn’t have to be hidden, leadership didn’t mean abandoning authenticity, and vulnerability was seen not as a liability but as a form of courage.

I know what ELAM has given me. It isn’t just skills or strategies, although those were valuable. It is the permission to lead without apology, to see leadership not as a struggle against isolation, but as a shared journey. It also gave me a new sisterhood and support network. These gifts are hard to quantify. Yet they have changed the trajectories of countless careers, and through them, countless institutions.

What This Change Means

The decision to admit men into ELAM or other women’s leadership programs—whether motivated by a genuine belief in evolving needs or by external legal pressure—raises hard questions about what is gained and what is lost.

I can’t deny the complicated truth. At times, such programs can feel like yet another credential women are expected to obtain—another invisible tax placed on ambition that men are rarely asked to pay. Leadership remains, even today, a space where women must overprepare, overperform, and overprove, often without acknowledgment. While these programs empower, they can also reinforce a quiet message: that women must go through extra steps to be seen as ready for what men are allowed to aspire to without question.

Spaces designed specifically for women are not simply professional development programs. They are emotional ecosystems, places where leadership can be cultivated without the background noise of defensiveness or self-justification. Once that space is diluted, it may never be fully recovered. There will be future classes of ELAM graduates who will never know what it meant to walk into a room where the struggles of leadership as a woman didn’t have to be explained before they could be addressed.

Still, I believe that bringing men into spaces like ELAM could also offer unexpected opportunities if done with care. Men who engage meaningfully could come to better understand the barriers their female colleagues have long faced—and might emerge better equipped to be genuine partners in dismantling them. But that future is not guaranteed. It depends on how carefully we protect the spirit that made programs like ELAM transformative in the first place.

Including men could, if handled thoughtfully, integrate the lessons of ELAM into a broader culture of leadership. Having men in the room—truly present, truly engaged—could help dismantle the notion that leadership must conform to narrow, traditionally masculine models. It could foster a deeper understanding of the barriers women have faced and continue to face, and could build a generation of leaders who are more empathetic, more inclusive, and more committed to equity not as an add-on, but as a core part of how institutions are run. New relationships built could benefit everyone in the room.

Done well, this shift could mean that the burden of explaining, justifying, and advocating for change no longer falls solely on women’s shoulders. It could mean leadership programs that teach not just how to navigate existing systems, but how to transform them.

The Upshot

Change is inevitable. Progress is not.

The decision to open ELAM to men marks the end of a remarkable era. But ELAM’s transformation is not an isolated story. Across the country, programs built to support women’s leadership are being dismantled, diluted, or reclassified.

This change not just for ELAM but potentially for all women’s leadership programs across many fields does not sit easily. Being forced to alter spaces created to address real, ongoing inequities feels wrong. It erases the history of struggle that made women’s leadership programs necessary in the first place and risks losing something essential—something that may not be easily rebuilt.

The danger is not just the loss of individual programs. It is the slow erosion of a collective acknowledgment that barriers still exist, and that targeted solutions are still needed.

The bottom line is that we need women leaders. The data is clear. Female leaders positively influence financial performance, innovation, ethical engagement, health outcomes, and organizational culture. As programs designed to cultivate female leaders are reshaped or abandoned, we must carry both pride and mourning, both determination and defiance. If the spirit of women’s leadership is to endure, it will not be because institutions protected it. It will be because we insisted on carrying it with us—into every room, every institution, and every future we choose to build.