About Us

Mission Statement

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

What We Do

The Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Initiative (WELI) is dedicated to assisting women in pediatric anesthesiology with gaining skills, knowledge, confidence, and opportunities to achieve their career goals. A key component of this mission is to pair/partner participating women (the protégés) with a volunteer leader in the pediatric anesthesia community. These leaders have a history of faculty mentoring and personal career success, and they work more closely to assist protégés in their specific area of interest. We call these leaders WELI “advisors”, and they use aspects of both advising and mentoring when working with their WELI protégés. Additionally, advisors and protégés will participate in twice-yearly skills workshops led by executive advisors and will be provided other outside resources on achieving success in academic medicine.

Our Members

The target membership for WELI are women in the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (SPA). Protégé applications are taken in the fall and spring.

As of March 2021, protégés eligible to apply to WELI must:

1. Be at least 3 years beyond completing their first fellowship, and
2. Have demonstrated contribution to a project related to the applicant’s career development, and
3. Outline an area of interest and 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.

If the protégé needs assistance in reaching out to a WELI steering committee member, she can 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 faculty from a specific institution, though we try to include faculty from all interested institutions.

Future of WELI

Based on market data, women in medicine are far 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 to women that are motivated to achieve academic success. Our goal is to increase women’s potential for promotion and leadership positions in pediatric anesthesiology.