Some barriers preventing women from entering the field:
Quinlan notes that, among surgeons, men are more likely than women to have spouses who do not work. Women are more likely to cite work-life balance as a reason for not entering the field. So he recommends making surgery a more livable discipline “” a change that would require a profound cultural transformation. “Sharing patients “¦ will need to be practiced more effectively,” he writes. “Competition among partners to do 1 more case or write 1 more paper needs to become obsolete.”
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{ 6 comments }
“Competition among partners to do 1 more case or write 1 more paper needs to become obsolete.”
One. Just another way of saying ‘lets level the playing field by playing by my rules’. Sorry, but competition is competition. Why would anyone agree to give a competitor a leg up.
Two. This flies in the face of arguments about ‘equal pay for equal work’. Within my department (anesthesiology) women earn exactly the same as men while they continue full time, and produce the work required to progress up the academic ladder. But, as soon as they start reducing their work load, lightening call responsibility, producing less academic work toward advancement then they earn less. They get unequal pay for unequal work. This is just.
Why does he want to change the conditions to get more women into surgery? That is ridiculous. The same with getting more of any other gender, race, anatomical type, or ethnic type into surgery. Surgery does not exist for the benefit of the surgeon. The reason, the only reason, to change the conditions of the surgical profession is to make better surgeons. The result of who choses to live with those conditions, should not be the concern.
I am not a surgeon. I did well on those rotations and had good manual skills, but didn’t like the culture, the hours, or the meanness in the surgical subculture at my teaching hospital. I think the later should be changed because I don’t think it makes better surgeons and I don’t think the pateints benefit. I also now realize that it isn’t universal. The hours on the other hand probably are necessary to make good surgeons–it is the necessity to cram 20 years of experience into 4.
Were they mean to the women that worked there? Yes, to the ones that wouldn’t fight back–as they were to men who wouldn’t fight back. The chairman was a bully and set the tone for everyone. That is what bullies do.
I call BS on this. Are those in the investment banking industry willing to change the work environment — with very long hours — to accommodate a group of people who want to work fewer hours? Would their clients be very happy about that?
Medicine is a great field, for the right person with the right skills and the right personality. Certain specialties attract men and women differently — that’s life!
By the way, I must have missed the hundreds of editorials bemoaning the lack of male OB/GYN residents or breast surgery fellows.
Standard resident entitlement mindset these days. I’ve got twerps who have been coddled all the way from kindergarden with ADHD diagnoses. These kids could have leveraged their ‘disability’ into some career that would have appreciated their particular manner of thinking. Instead they show up having gotten extra time on every test for the last 20+ years and have had every teaching and assessment situation modified to fit their IEP (individualized education plan).
The artificial world of education might be ammenable to manipulation to coddle these doctors in training, but the patients don’t have to ‘accomodate’ their doctors. It is a hell of a shock to them that they are going to have to function without the aid of a system holding them up.
Equal pay for equal work is fair. Maybe it is up to the women to keep from choosing chauvanistic idiots who perpetuate their domestic enslavement.
As for the investment banking comment and “coddled” children, perhaps it would be useful to give you an international perspective, that the work maximum for residents in the UK is 56 at te moment but soon with Mainland Europe to be 48, in Australia/New Zealand 70. In ALL these countries and in investment banking, the remuneration is around 2 times that of residents in the states, minus 150 thousand dollars of average debt. American residency is indentured servitude, where the hierarches profit off of the young doctors.
Let there be no mistake, these hours (even if you have suffered them) are abusive and dangerous for patients. So the question is, not should we lessen hours to attract women but who have you killed because you were too tired to perform optimally?
Let’s see…if we have men who have stay-at-home wives at home (basically full-time domestic assistants) then the problem of work-life balance is minimized a lot. However, a female surgeon is not going to be able to find a male who is willing to stay home his entire life like many women do, so they usually have a lot more trouble juggling work and home. A female surgeon can always contract out her house duties to maids and nannies, however a nanny is not going to stay for a lifetime like most wives do. So in this situation, males definitely have the upper hand. And we cannot blame men, as all the female physicians I know demand similarly educated people, unlike male physicians, who generally dont care about their wives’ level of education.
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