The desire for equity is one of the main driving forces behind Dr. Angela Jarman’s career. She is working to understand and mitigate modifiable health disparities for women through educational, research, and clinical initiatives. And while her focus is specifically on sex and gender, it is impossible to study these without being reminded daily of the importance of intersectionality and the weight of minority status in any number of demographics (education, socioeconomic status, race, religion, disability, etc). While at her undergraduate training at Duke University was in Gender Studies, she didn’t fully appreciate the impact of that lens until she began practicing medicine and saw the myriad ways in which both patients’ sex and gender impacted their health. Unfortunately, women have far too often been historically excluded from research that informs their care. The house of medicine has had to learn the hard way through disparate morbidity and mortality rates than women are not in fact men with substituted sex organs. She has dedicated her career to advancing our knowledge about the ways in which sex and gender impact acute care medicine. Following residency training, she completed an additional two–year academic fellowship in Sex & Gender in Emergency Medicine to develop and hone her skills. As part of that training, she earned a Masters in Public Health and spent time in Rwanda learning about the effects of sex and gender as determinants
of disease on a global scale. Her ultimate goal is to improve the care that we provide to women, such that modifiable health disparities based on their sex and gender are mitigated or eliminated.
In addition to her academic interest in health equity, she remained a staunch advocate for diversity of all kinds and at all levels within [and outside of] her institution. One of the motivators behind her move to California and to UC Davis was the diversity of the patient population that they care for, particularly on the front lines in the Emergency Department. As a health equity advocate, she tirelessly works to increase physician diversity to more accurately reflect their patient population, as we know this improves outcomes for our patients. She is a founding member of our department’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Committee and continues to work on a number of efforts to increase the recruitment and retention of outstanding resident and faculty candidates from all backgrounds. She is a strong advocate of holistic review and has written letters of recommendation for medical students from underrepresented backgrounds in support of their excellent candidacies for residency. She is also lucky to be able to provide didactic and workshop training in her department on caring for LGBTQ patients, and victims of gender–based violence (physical and sexual),
and to educate her peers and trainees on the principles of trauma-informed care. This care paradigm, which places the patient at the center and emphasizes cultural humility is crucial to our providing excellent clinical care and is a universally applicable concept. She herself is a woman and as such belongs to a nationally underrepresented group in academic emergency medicine. She believes that a diverse workforce is an excellent workforce and she supports the
recruitment, retention, and promotion of women in EM both locally and nationally. She routinely participates in mentoring activities within the SOM, including an annual AMWA–sponsored mentoring dinner, to support medical students and help them understand the unique challenges and rewards of a career in academic
EM. She personally mentors several outstanding young women (medical students, residents, fellows) both at UC Davis and other institutions specifically to try to support their management of challenges that may be specific to their minoritized identities. In addition, she hosts an annual gathering for women trainees in her
home in a continued effort to create a safe and supportive space to share their experiences and creative solutions to any challenges they may have encountered. Finally, as a Woman in Medicine and Health Sciences departmental liaison, she also co-leads programming specifically for women in her department. It is one of her primary goals to advocate for equity at all levels for both our patients and our providers.