What are the Leadership and Management Positions in Medical Education? A Scoping Review

Leadership can be defined as a combination of position, responsibilities, attitude, skills, and behaviours contributing to sustainable success. Despite extensive research on the representation of various groups, including genders and personal qualities, in leadership and management positions in medical education, there remains a lack of clarity regarding what these positions exactly are. In this scoping review, we aimed to determine these positions by following Levac et al.'s framework. We searched four databases; PubMed, ERIC, Scopus, and Web of Science until March 23, 2023, resulting in 558 records for screening after removing duplicates and applying some exclusions. The review included 266 studies for data extraction and synthesis. In addition to the leadership positions, we revealed the studies’ countries, main context, discipline, and year. We identified 396 leadership and management positions in medical education under four categories: academic, administrative, journal- related, and society-related positions. Additionally, the majority of the studies (59.77%) were on gender-related topics, followed by those focusing on underrepresented minorities. The articles covered 40 different disciplines, with the surgical fields exhibiting the highest frequencies, such as orthopaedic surgery, neurosurgery, and plastic and reconstructive surgery. The systematically developed list of positions in our study may be considered as a valuable resource for future research, especially in studies that aim to determine the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in leadership and management positions in medical education.