{"id":1531,"date":"2008-05-06T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2008-05-06T09:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/06\/ok-now-im-mad-i\/"},"modified":"2008-05-06T09:00:09","modified_gmt":"2008-05-06T09:00:09","slug":"ok-now-im-mad-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/06\/ok-now-im-mad-i\/","title":{"rendered":"TOO MANY WOMEN DOCTORS? ARE YOU SERIOUS? DON’T YOU WATCH GREY’S ANATOMY?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Too_many_women_docs_2\"<\/a>
\nOK now I’m mad!  I have a pretty high tolerance for media assumptions and misrepresentations unfair to those of us who are female.  I do.  Really.  But I think I’ve hit the wall.  Listen to this, from Business Week<\/a> this week (here’s a hint – the article is called "Are There Too Many
\nWomen Doctors?" ) The premise – there’s a doctor shortage in the US and:  <\/span>This looming shortage is forcing into the open a controversy that has
\nbeen cautiously debated in hospitals and medical practices for some time: Are
\nwomen doctors part of the problem? <\/strong><\/span>It’s
\nnot the abilities of female doctors that are in question. It’s that study after
\nstudy has found women doctors tend to work 20% to 25% fewer hours than their
\nmale counterparts.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

What to discuss first?  That those who work that additional 20-25% probably work too hard?  That resentments build
\nup in their spouses and children that never go away.  That the "problem" is in reality a grand improvement achieved through the work and suffering of a generation of women who fought their way through medical school, internships and fellowships and now use their knowledge both to take care of people and to still live a life of their own. Shocking!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I married my husband in 1971 while he was in medical school.  Med
\nschool classes then were only 10% women and those women had a tough
\ntime.  One of his female colleagues was thrown out of an operating room
\nfor not wearing pantyhose under her scrubs – accused of having
\n"perineal fallout" – basically crotch germs.  (As Dave Barry <\/a>would say, "I am not making this up!")  The first woman chief
\nresident in surgery started just before we left.  She suffered too.
\nAnd that doesn’t even begin to consider the few brave woman of the
\ngeneration the preceded them, so well represented by Meredith Gray’<\/a>s mom, in the body of Kate Burton<\/a>.)
\nAt their 1970s daughters had the women’s movement behind them and it
\ngradually became politically incorrect to openly harass women med
\nstudents.  Over the years though, even these heroines have continued to
\nbrave amazing odds.<\/p>\n

In 1974 I helped a woman launch a book called Why Would a Girl Go into Medicine?<\/a>
\nThat’s how tough it was to even imagine the possibility.  Those women fought
\nto be considered for good fellowships because they were women. Some
\nspent post-graduate years making rounds carrying a camp stool to sit
\ndown at each bed as they presented the patient to the attending because even late in pregnancy they never missed — or asked for relief from — a day of their training.  All
\nendured taunts, being treated, even as lowly interns, worse than their
\nmale colleagues, being mistaken for nurses (NO being a nurse is not lesser, or bad
\n– but the gender assumption is.)  And now, through our brave sisters,
\nwe’ve reached our current dilemma.  How terrible!  Women in medicine
\nfinding a balanced life, giving each patient great care but not taking
\nmore patients than they can care for.<\/p>\n

OK fine.  Is that where we are?  Did it never occur to these people
\nthat the basic assumption here does not apply uniformly?  Men who
\n"spend more time with their families" still merit cover stories and hugs on women-hosted talk shows but scratch a 3-day-a-week female
\ninternist and apparently you find an education-wasting,
\neconomy-distorting, sick-people-neglecting harridan.  And yes, I know
\nI’m exaggerating but hell, Meredith may be a whiny pain, but do we
\nreally want to go back to when many women doctors felt they had to be
\nlike her mother?<\/p>\n

\"Pants_suit_1970_3\"<\/a>
\nI guess, what I’m really saying is that this makes me sad.  Angry
\ntoo, as I’ve written, but really, really sad.  It is 2008.  I graduated
\nfrom college 40 years ago!  Fought to wear pants suits with stupid tunics so they’d look like skirts (I stuck a photo her so you cold see how dumb they were – it’s the only one I have but you can see the tunic – just imagine the pants under them – to work.  Fought to keep my
\nname when I got married.  Fought to be allowed to enter the National
\nPress Club (as I’ve written before, women journalists had to stay in the
\nbalcony.) Fought to work in journalism.  Fought to manage coverage of
\nthe end of the Vietnam War, the fall of Cambodia, the war in Cyprus,
\nthe New York blackout, the Son of Sam…  and was terrified to say "my son
\nis sick, I need to go home."  I did it, gladly, but to me it was a huge
\nblack mark when I did.  I would have given anything for a four day week – or at least comprehension that I wasn’t less of a journalist because I was a committed mom.  <\/p>\n

Most of these young physicians don’t have to do many of those things, but are<\/em> forced to take the blame for circumstances created by the medical economy: where doctors settle and where there are shortages, how many are admitted to med school in the first place, which specialties they choose and other facts that have nothing to do with the fact that they’re women.  Nothing except the fact that they’re women, and the default objects of blame in circumstances like these.<\/p>\n

About a month ago I wrote a post about rape in the US military<\/a>; again, women left to do the suffering (on a much more hateful and physical level)  while those committing the assaults  were overlooked or barely punished.  From crimes against women to daily working life, these issues rise in fall in our minds depending on what’s going on around us.  Sometimes I forget.  But never for long.<\/p>\n

So yes, for me this is personal.  It all happened to us a long time ago.  It shouldn’t still be happening now.   <\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK now I’m mad!  I have a pretty high tolerance for media assumptions and misrepresentations unfair to those of us who are female.  I do.  Really.  But I think I’ve hit the wall.  Listen to this, from Business Week this week (here’s a hint – the article is called "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?" … Continue reading TOO MANY WOMEN DOCTORS? ARE YOU SERIOUS? DON’T YOU WATCH GREY’S ANATOMY?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,7,9,97],"tags":[1548,1549,1547,1546,48,1212,1545,44,1543,1544,1230],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-politics","category-television","tag-70s","tag-businessweek","tag-doctor-shortage","tag-doctors","tag-feminism","tag-mothers","tag-part-time","tag-women-2","tag-women-doctors","tag-women-in-medicine","tag-working-mothers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-oH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}