Friday, July 15th, 2011
In my first post I mentioned how some of the issues I faced in my transition to doctorhood may have been specific to my situation, my personality and my gender. I want to take a few minutes now to talk about the latter: the often overlooked, unexplored experience of being a woman and a house surgeon. As a woman I have a vague sort of equal parts appreciation and equal parts guilt when thinking of the history that brought me to where I am today – appreciation of the pioneering women who went before me when they were literally one in a hundred, along with a guilt that I am taking for granted how comparatively easy I now have it. In saying this however I cannot deny that there remain a few difficulties unique to being a female junior doctor even today.
I will preface the following with a disclaimer: I love being a woman. Despite lacking the conviction of a true feminist I am certain that the inbuilt dispositions of women bring an invaluable dimension to the provision of healthcare. I may be generalising to some degree because an individual’s personality ultimately plays a big part, but there is something to be said about the beauty and emotion of a woman’s touch.
Herein lies my Catch-22.
Being a house surgeon requires me to make decisions about others, enforce the decisions of my bosses, and with all that, advocate for my patient’s wellbeing. To complicate matters, I have little control over the larger context in which I am working. I am but one cog in a very busy machine in which (literally) a thousand different agendas are being pursed by thousands of different people everyday. Therefore in order to do my job I must be firm, direct, clear, fast and efficient, and I must prioritise and delegate. This is the same regardless of gender. However allow me to propose two key aspects of being a woman that can make this job trickier than our male counterparts may find.
The first is related to the complexities of female-female dynamics. For you ladies reading this, take a moment to cast your mind back to your primary school days. Amidst the sticker books, Spice Girls choreography and roly-polies, you may recall the birthday party dramas. “You’re invited to my birthday party!” ‘You’re NOT invited to my birthday party!” “She’s MY best friend!” “No, she’s MYYY best friend!” I do not claim to be a social anthropologist, but from personal experience and reflection I have found that female-female interactions tend to be multi-layered, while male-male and (professional) female-male interactions tend to be much more straight-forward. And when you’re working alongside female nurses and other female health professionals, add to the female-female dynamic differences in age, medical knowledge, personalities and conflicting agendas, and you will find issues can arise.
Sometimes it is misunderstanding and/or misinterpretation of what you have done or said. (For example, you might explain to somebody as part of your professional duty that what they have done is potentially very dangerous for the patient and by doing what they did they assumed responsibility had something gone wrong. Yet what they hear in this explanation is an attack on their person. Whoa, you think to yourself, that was unexpected.) Yet regardless of why, ultimately it can feel like there is only a very fine line between being a firm, direct, clear, fast and efficient, prioritising, delegating house surgeon, and being perceived by others as bossy and demanding… while our male counterparts are admired for their “confidence” and “professionalism” in doing the same thing.
The second aspect with which I have struggled is the way this job often tries to rob me of my femininity. I admit, that may sound a bit cheesy or superficial, but I am at the end of the day only human, and I, as a woman, like to feel like a woman… and not a tired, smelly, bossy-and-demanding IT, unfazed by rectal exams and urinary catheters. A couple of weeks ago I was doing a string of medical night shifts covering eleven wards on my own for eleven hours. Getting a total of maybe three hours broken sleep during the day and absolutely none during the shift itself, I felt and looked like the undead. As I stood in the drug room at 2am setting up to do an IV leur round, I could feel the wrinkles slowly forming around my eyes.
A single woman in her mid-twenties, I found myself asking into the Void, “Is this really worth it?”
I am still waiting for an answer.
To my future female colleagues, we are privileged to be in this position. Our right to be here was fought for and now, believe it or not, we are the majority. Yet there are still aspects of the job that demands things from us it does not from our male counterparts. I have yet to figure out a solution, or even reconcile myself to this inevitability. I have had a few tricky, unexpected, and even horrible experiences, but with all that I have little to offer other than a heads-up.
But if you’re ever in Auckland get in touch — we can have a brainstorm over coffee and continue to make Beyonce proud.
