As I reflect upon the past year, 2018 has certainly made a mark for addressing burnout among medical professionals, enforcing wellness, and targeting implicit and explicit gender bias in medicine and surgery.
Dr. Laura Drudi
Looking back, I entered surgery with a dream to change the culture of surgery. I knew I didn’t fit the traditional mold of an aggressive or arrogant surgeon. But I thought that my empathetic, open, and compassionate ways may spark a change in paradigm for that traditional surgical ideology. However, what I encountered as I made my way on this long, ever-winding journey was a system, culture, and tradition that beats you down, and what I thought were my strengths were quickly turned into weaknesses. As I grew and matured, this loss of identity in a culture of depersonalization surrounded by gender bias, for me, was a perfect recipe leading straight to burnout. However, this was an impetus for change, to be that voice and spark for a cultural transformation of surgery and for the women who work in the specialty.
More women are entering medical and surgical specialties. However, despite the advances made there are still clear gender-based disparities influencing overall wellness and work satisfaction. For instance, a study by Meyerson et al. demonstrated that female residents receive less operating room autonomy than male ones. I see it daily within my own curriculum and in observing other female residents in other surgical specialties. Furthermore, female residents are less often introduced by their physician titles, compared with their male counterparts, are often confused as nonphysicians, and are perceived as being less competent. This influences, to no small extent, overall confidence. It’s discouraging and disheartening to have worked so hard and yet still be treated in a sexist paradigm. And to top it all off, female physicians face a motherhood penalty.
In a recent study by Magudia et al., out of 12 top medical institutions that provided maternity leave, only 8 did so for residents with a grant total of 6.6 weeks on average. Furthermore, women with children or women who plan to have children have constrained career opportunities and are less likely to get full professorship or leadership positions. Anecdotally, a surgeon in passing semijokingly told me that if I were to take a specific academic vascular position, I may have to sign an agreement not to get pregnant … probably not the job for me.
It’s appalling that, in this day and age, these explicit beliefs still exist, but what scares me more are all the implicit unconscious biases that affect all women not only in surgery but in medicine as well.
Looking back, 2018 is a year of beginning difficult conversations about physician and surgeon wellness, burnout, and gender bias. What’s obvious is that there is a hell of a lot of work to do. But change is slowly starting. We are now recognizing what the issues are, and the next step is to take action. It’s difficult to steer big ships, but there is an active community investing in strategies to improve the cultural scope of surgery and supporting and valuing women and what they have to offer.
References
Magudia K et al. JAMA. 2018;320(22):2372-4.
Meyerson SL et al. J Surg Educ. 2017;74(6):e111-18.
Dr. Drudi is a vascular surgery resident at McGill University, Montreal, and the resident medical editor of Vascular Specialist.
