8th Annual Women in Medicine Summit™ returns to The Drake
By Morgan Collier, Executive Director of Women in Medicine™
Most people have lived some version of this. The doctor who knew your whole history, who caught the thing three other people missed, who you had finally come to trust, is one day just gone from the practice. The specialist you waited four months to see. The nurse who made a terrifying hospital stay survivable is no longer working at the bedside.
Good people leave healthcare constantly, and the rest of us pay for it. Longer waits. Starting over with someone new. Being cared for by people running on empty.
There is a reason for that turnover that is not often discussed. Healthcare attracts remarkable people, yet makes it unusually hard for many of them to stay, advance, and lead.
Look at who ends up in charge. More than half of U.S. medical students are women. Women hold about a quarter of medical school department chair positions and roughly a quarter of leadership roles across academic health systems. Nurses, researchers, and hospital administrators show the same split: a workforce that is largely women, and a decision-making layer that is not.
The talent showed up decades ago. What surrounds it has never changed. And ultimately, patients absorb the cost.
A Chicago idea that became a national movement
In 2019, Shikha Jain, MD, a hematologist-oncologist and tenured associate professor of medicine at the University of Illinois Cancer Center, had watched too many brilliant colleagues quietly leave medicine. She stopped waiting for an institution to fix it. She built the room herself: three days where women could learn to negotiate a contract, hear how someone else survived a bad chair, meet the person who would eventually hire them, and leave with a plan, not just a feeling.
What started as a single Chicago convening became Women in Medicine®, a national nonprofit with nearly 7,000 members, year-round programming, a research lab, a fellowship, a speakers bureau, and more. The summit remains its anchor event, and Chicago remains its home.
“Chicago is not incidental to this,” Jain says. “With world-class academic medical centers, extraordinary safety-net hospitals, and profound health disparities existing within miles of one another, this is exactly where an honest conversation about rebuilding American healthcare should happen, and where a movement to change it should begin.”
Three days built for Monday morning
The 2026 accredited continuing medical education, or CME, program brings together more than 60 physicians, executives, researchers, and advocates presenting to hundreds of attendees from around the nation. Sessions cover the practical machinery of a healthcare career: negotiating compensation and contracts, building a leadership portfolio, communicating science in an era of misinformation, using artificial intelligence responsibly, and leading through institutional upheaval.
The keynote lineup spans health system leadership, public health, clinical research, and women’s health, with Joanne Conroy, MD, Debra Houry, MD, Sherita Golden, MD, and Jennifer Lincoln, MD. It also features Will Flanary, MD, and Kristin Flanary, the couple known to millions online as The Glaucomfleckens, whose comedy about medical culture has become one of the more effective vehicles for saying true things about how healthcare actually works.
Much of the value happens between sessions. A resident finds herself seated next to a dean. A mid-career physician weighing a change talks with someone who has already made it. A hospital executive hears which workplace practices are quietly costing the organization its best people. A woman looking to change her career finds someone who has already navigated a similar path.
On Friday evening, the EmpowerHer Med Gala transforms The Drake’s Gold Coast Room for dinner, storytelling, and the I Stand With Her Awards, which honor women leaders in healthcare and the allies beside them. The gala is the summit’s signature celebration and its primary annual fundraiser.
Allies are essential
The summit is not a women-only room. Men attend, speak, sponsor, and mentor every year. Fixing a system cannot fall solely to the people who are disadvantaged by it. It takes colleagues, institutional leaders, policymakers, and funders willing to use their influence to address the problem.
The room is built for physicians, nurses, advanced practice clinicians, administrators, researchers, trainees, and executives. The people who approve budgets, make hiring decisions, and write policy belong there alongside the people whose ideas have too often been overlooked.
What patients get out of it
Everything discussed at the summit eventually reaches the exam room.
When leadership lacks a range of perspectives, it shapes which questions get asked, which research gets funded, which policies move forward, and which communities go unstudied. Conditions that primarily affect women have historically been underfunded and understudied, and that gap traces back to who has held decision-making authority.
When experienced clinicians burn out and leave, their patients lose access to years of accumulated judgment that cannot be replaced quickly. Recruiting talented people into medicine is the easy part. Building a system where they can stay, thrive, and lead is the work that determines what care actually looks like for the people receiving it.
Be in the room
The 8th Annual Women in Medicine Summit™ takes place Thursday, Sept. 24, through Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, at The Drake Hotel, 140 East Walton Place, in Chicago’s Gold Coast.
Registration, the full agenda, speaker roster, and sponsorship information are available at wimedicine.org/wim-summit. Group rates and a discounted attendee room block are available; the room block closes Aug. 14.
Eight years in, the summit has become a national movement of people who believe medicine can be better and who are building what comes next. The conversations will happen. The partnerships will begin. The next generation of healthcare leadership will be in the room.
