Recently, a female physician we know shared an experience she had while considering taking a faculty position at a new institution: She had been communicating with the faculty chairperson for months and had been promised a faculty position with a designated leadership role. She had returned for a second set of interviews, but she was ready to sign.

Then, at the final meeting on the final day, she went to get coffee with another faculty member, who had been at the institution for more than a decade. The two had overlapping academic areas of interest and had collaborated on projects together. Over the years, she’d received an occasional strongly worded and aggressively toned email from him, the typical scenario being him complaining about feeling disrespected on writing projects with multiple authors. On one particularly memorable occasion, he had curtly and angrily accused her of not incorporating edits on which he claimed to have spent hours, only to later realize he’d been looking at the wrong draft.

At the coffee shop meeting, he took charge of the discussion. With pen and paper, he drew out his view of the position hierarchy […]