A friend forwarded me an article from the British Medical Journal titled “Are There Too Many Female Medical Graduates? Yes”. My friend is a Ghanaian woman who is in the research years of an MD/PhD degree at Harvard. She was none too pleased. I didn’t get riled up because objectively the points raised are grossly true. On the other hand, I found some of the comments on the BusinessWeek article “Women Doctors: Waste of Money?” insulting to say the least.
The article points out the increased representation of women in medical schools in developed countries, now around 50%. The author also states that women doctors are more likely to work part-time, retire earlier, and that women doctors with children publish medical papers less than men doctors with children. Now am I going to refute that? No. What I take offence to is the interpretation that because of these observations the education of women doctors is a waste of money. Why?
That interpretation insinuates that women are lazier and have less desire or competency to contribute to the discovery of science and medicine. That interpretation does not leave room to ask why do women doctors and a lot of other women professionals find themselves in a position of having to give up on certain parts of their desired career. Even the author himself point out that “despite many years of feminist discourse society still expects women and not men to reduce work commitments to look after children…”
I doubt society’s expectation of gender roles is going to change much and I doubt men are going to absorb a significant fraction of “woman work” to allow the woman to devote most of her life to her career. So I really don’t have time for disparaging comments about women in medicine. The following is the response I sent my friend. Trust that you have been forewarned.
Even in “progressive America” and other Western countries with improved conditions for women versus us in our backwards African countries (please note sarcasm), women still carry the burden of child care (cleaning, feeding, schoolwork, activities, etc), parent care, home upkeep, feeding the family, and trying to prevent the husband from straying! How many mothers or wives will be successful as mothers and/or wives if they spend their whole existence in the hospital during medical training (100-120 hrs/wk before the 80 hr work rule) and afterwards taking care of huge panels of patients or performing research?
I can’t get offended by articles like this. In the so-called golden days of medicine when doctors were predominantly male those men had no other job but patient care and research. Coming home to sex the wife and be stern with or play with the kids for a few hours was likely an afterthought to the days work. In other words, much of the success of the traditional male doctor who could spend endless hours at work healing patients and making new scientific discoveries depended on the readiness of his wife to devote her entire life to supporting him emotionally and physically while raising his progeny at home by herself.
There’s a reason research shows that married men live longer than single men. I wouldn’t be surprised if the flip-side, single women living longer than married women, is true.
Proponents of “women doctors are a waste of money” can take themselves and go because women in medicine are the reason for a number of positive changes in the practice of medicine. For example empathy. Furthermore, there’s more to life than work. Look at the social science studies of physicians that were performed decades ago when the field was over-represented by the traditional male doctor. These studies clearly show a suicide rate two to three times that of the general population and a drug addiction rate 30-100 times that of the general population. This is not merely chance.
I’m sure the older male doctors who have expressed medicine from their very pores their whole lives and for whom retirement is a dirty word, if forced to really consider their lives and their contribution to the world, will realize the plentiful mistakes they have made in their personal lives even if they did win the Nobel Prize in medicine or developed a new surgical procedure. I’m also sure that the younger male doctors if given the option would prefer their wives to work, even if it is on a part-time basis, for the extra income even when they don’t exactly pick up their fair share of child-rearing and house-keeping. N’est-ce pas?
So remind me again exactly what is so bad about working normal hours during residency? That is if the attempted 80 hours work week restriction can be considered normal hours. What is so bad about having days off where you are not responsible for clinical care, or for having a clear-cut end of the work-day? If the male medical students of today were not interested in balancing life and work, would we have the current scramble for so-called lifestyle fields with the resultant neglect for primary care field as we now do? The BusinessWeek article would be better titled “YOUNG DOCTORS: WASTE OF MONEY?” and not attack women. After all, both men and women in medical school, in residency, and those recently graduated these days don’t want to spend their whole lives in the hospital. They’ve realized as the affection-starved kids of yesterday’s doctors that being a parent or a spouse is just as important as, if not more than, being a doctor. Hurray for that!
On the flip-side we do need to accept that with this changing role comes decreased respect (we are no longer THE DOCTOR, but rather a wife/husband, mother/father, daughter/son, sister/brother who is ALSO a doctor), decreased life time pay (stretched out education, increased vacations, part-time work, decreased reimbursement, earlier retirement), and increased managed care as medicine becomes a salaried job and not a self-employed business. As long as we can accept that we should be fine! But here lies the problem. We, the next generation of physicians, are not ready to accept this change. We think we should hold a God complex in a time when society no longer holds us to that esteem and in fact distrusts us especially now that they have Doctor Internet to consult at all hours of the day.
So my dear, all I can say is that if society expects women to be women defined as childbearers and nurturers then either don’t bother sending us to kindergarten in the first place or accept the changes that come with our increased representation in the professional world as a result of our successful schooling performance.
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