Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Initiative

Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Initiative

About Us

Mission Statement

The mission of WELI is to empower highly productive pediatric anesthesiologists to achieve equity, promotion, and leadership.

What We Do

The Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Initiative (WELI) is dedicated to assisting pediatric anesthesiologists with gaining skills, knowledge, confidence, and opportunities to achieve their career goals. A key component of this mission is to connect  protégés with an advisor. The advisors have a history of mentoring and personal career success, and they offer guidance tailored to each protégé’s area of interest. Advisors may draw on advising, mentoring, and coaching approaches. WELI also fosters collaboration and connection through group discussions and networking to facilitate professional advancement and build a sense of belonging. Additionally, advisors and protégés join in-person and virtual workshops led by executive coaches and content experts throughout the year.

Our Members

WELI protégés are anesthesiologists in the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (SPA). WELI advisors may be from any specialty.

Protégés eligible to apply to WELI must:

  1. Be an attending anesthesiologist, and
  2. Ideally have demonstrated contribution to a project related to the applicant’s career development, and
  3. Outline an area of interest and ideally any work already done in that area.
  4. We also highly encourage that protégé applicants be nominated by one or more of the following:
    1. current Chair or division Chief; or
    2. current or past WELI member; or
    3. other senior leader in active academic practice who holds the rank of Professor or Associate Professor.
  5. We also accept and encourage self-nominations.

For assistance in reaching out to a WELI Advisory Board member, please contact WELI at https://weli.pedsanesthesia.org/contact

The number of available protégé spots depends on the number of available advisors. We do not limit the number of WELI members from a specific institution or organization.

Future of WELI

Based on market data, women in medicine are less likely to obtain academic promotion or leadership positions compared to their male counterparts.  We believe that there is a place for the WELI program to bring attention to this discrepancy and provide high-quality advising, mentoring, and resources – including allyship and sponsorship – to help anesthesiologists of all genders achieve success.