No discrimination in medicine?

[notanumber]

A FB friend posted a link to this publication in which she has a small article. (It's the Medical Student View at the bottom of pg 17)

The précis is that soon more than 50% of doctors will be women and that sexual discriminaion basically doesn't occur in the medical profession.

What are your thoughts?

absolutely Such! I spent most of my career in a female-dominated department being bossed around by men.

when I first started there was a woman at the top and the thick layer of men in the hierarchy just below her used her existence as incontrovertible proof that there could be no sexism of any sort in the organiation.

I think the woman who wrote that article is just bloody naive and almost certainly childless and has not yet hit the glass ceiling. As a woman you often do encounter a lot of openness and supportiveness from men at the beginning of your career. And then it stops.

here

is a 2006 rcp study on the future of women in medicine
and

here

is a 1996 article showing how women are dispersed within the profession.

I think medicine is a good career for women to pursue, because at least they earn enough to pay for childcare and dont get caught in the 'cant afford to work' camp.

But opportunities are limited and discrimination is as rife as in any other male-dominated sphere.

dittany Mon 17-Jan-11 00:11:04
Medicine is a patriarchal institution, set up to serve men. This woman is just stupid if she's denying it.

Can you explain this for me, Dittany? I'm not sure I understand this point.

Thanks Such, that's a very good point. How do you thnk that discrimination reveals itself in medicine then (if not the ratio of male to femeale practitioners)?

It will be in the usual way - by the number of senior men vs women and by the average wage of men vs women.

Also by the speed of progression and the stature and recognition they achieve (regardless of salary equality).

The other aspect that is rarely talked about is whether the status of medicine will go down as the number of women increase. I had seen (but can't now find) an interesting article on medicine in the States several years ago about how Dr.s' wages had steadily declined relative to other professions as the percentage of women increased.

I can believe that Such. It's what happens to every profession when women get in.

There's a lot of sense on this thread but not by the person who wrote the 'small article' at best she can say she hasn't experienced any as a med student.
I think she needs to open her eyes a bit more to what is going on around her TBH.

I personally know of 3 people who 'lost' consultant jobs, it was widely recognised that this happened because they had a baby

totally shameful

such GG says that in the whole woman- that as the number of women in a profession increases its status declines, eg clerical work and teaching

Sorry have only skimmed.

Have a few docs in the family. My view is that yes medicine is a pretty good bet for women in the UK - as it is public sector. The NHS like many public sector jobs has basically fixed pay for grade so they can't get away with paying women less than men. Or be racist for that matter. You do the job you get the pay.

General practice agree as well it is popular with women (in my dad's view) as it is more easy to go part time after children. Seems women docs must be quite good at thinking about taking a family friendly route when they are young (IME most women don't even think about it until they are thinking about children or have had them!) but that's by the by.

ALERT though much of the NHS is going to be privatised shortly so we may well see a reversal of these positive stories.

Also agree that though there may be lots of women at the bottom - with hosp docs anyway - few women make it to consultant compared to men. There was a prog recently and it was the old story the ones who had done it had no children or had to be back ASAP full time as if nothing had happened - same as the story across the board (no pun intended) elsewhere.

This is a really interesting thread, that I've come to a bit late.

FWIW, I'll add in a bit of my personal experience as I think it links to a lot of what you have said.

My DH is a GP and has found it very easy to get work, but says that some female friends of his have struggled to be seen as good Drs, they are often looked as a female Dr. The gender difference making them either useful or not, rather than their skills.

He once heard a chief Dr moaning about all the maternity leave that was being taken by several female GPs at once and complained in a flippant manner to DH that it seems like the GP training scheme was, "a fancy finishing school for women who want to have babies."

DH was at that, but he does agree that GP is a more family-friendly discipline of medicine, rather than some hospital settings like A&E.

Actually A&E is pretty family friendly as far as I'm concerned!!

Quite literally 50% of the hours most of us work, (almost 50% of the years of training too) fixed shifts, rarely overruns, well staffed, until very recently senior staff were rarely in on call (although did have high freq on call) lots of jobs fewer exams (maybe-I'm out of date with A&E training so that might no longer be true).

It used to be seen much more as being for people who couldn't get the job they wanted IYSWIM

If you want family unfriendly got to be surgery cardiothoracic, maybe neurosurgery. The surgeons know and there is WIST (women in surgical training)

Tbh, I'm not really sure about A&E either, it was just the first hospital discipline that popped into my head.

DH is a GP so that's really the only medical field I have a proper insight into.

My main point was more about what the senior Dr said about female GPs, as imo, that's a pretty shoddy viewpoint to have.

My friend has just been appointed as the first part-time consultant in her dept.

What you find in medicine is that most females go down to 3 days/week when babies arrive (usually in junior posts) then jump back up to 4/5 days when made a consultant.

The telling statistic is that part-time male doctors are virtually non-existant.

Dh's dept introduced a uniform last year, and on the back of a comment from carol Black at the time ("feminisation is not good for the future of medicine") he reckoned this was all contributing to medicine being "run down".