College celebrates Women Pharmacist Day

October 12 is Women Pharmacist Day (WPD).

The month was chosen honor of October being American Pharmacists Month and the date in honor of Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf, who was not only the country's first female pharmacist but also, rather astonishingly, the mother of 12 children.

Greenleaf was quite a trailblazer. Born in the Massachusetts Colony in 1681, she moved to Boston in 1727 to open an apothecary shop half a century before the United States even existed.

Earlier this year, the MUSC College of Pharmacy celebrated some of its own women trailblazers in the social media series #RebelWomenWednesdays. As far back as 1958, when Margaret Blair Bobo was the first woman to enroll in the inaugural MUSC pharmacy residency program, the women of MUSC pharmacy have been barrier-breakers. The social media series featured women like Cynthia Feldman, Jean Nappi, Deborah Stier Carson, Wendy Bullington, Jennifer MacDonald, Kathy Chessman, and Carolyn Magee Bell.

Founded by the women pharmacists advocacy group Pharmacist Moms, Women Pharmacist Day is designed to:

• Celebrate the significant gains that women have made in pursuing careers in pharmacy.
• Honor the trailblazers who have made such progress possible.
• Recognize the important contributions that women pharmacists make, every day, to delivering quality care to patients in communities, nationwide.

While women made up only eight percent of all U.S. pharmacists as recently as the 1960s, women currently comprise 55 percent of the pharmacist workforce, and that number is expected to continue to rise. Approximately 61 percent of the 14,000 Pharm.D.s earned in the United States in 2016 were earned by women.