Gender Equity in IPM; Is it a Problem?

[drusso]

How should IPM address concerns about gender equity?

Every medical student deserves to be educated in an anti-bias learning environment

"Before I started medical school, I was blissfully unaware of the biases that still exist in medicine. I had heard people talk about them, but given that I spent much of my time with my head in a book, I hadn’t paid much attention. When I started my third-year clerkships, I began to see them more clearly."

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[lobelsteve]

Mandate it to be male only, then no issue would exist.
Or, nothing to address. As an asst PD in the past, best candidate regardless of race/creed/sex/height. Paper and personality.

 

[BobBarker]

Female applicants seem to do well. I had a classmate get a fellowship spot incredibly early in the year on the west coast. A female applicant got the spot at Colorado that the PD told me directly was mine.

 

[deleted480308]

The reason so many patients think a woman might be a nurse is because so many women in a hospital actually are nurses. It was the 80s before the last nursing school started allowing men in...

But yeah, if the surgeon said that he was an idiot. But my class just matched more women than men to ortho so that guy clearly doesn’t run the planet

 

[Tapspatellas]

Being male I can’t know what it’s like to be a woman in medicine. I’ve definitely been mistaken for the attending as a med student, but I look a bit older and am a big guy, so seem the part. Only with younger or younger looking female residents and attendings. The middle aged or older female attendings with whom I worked were never mistaken. It plays into our own biases and assumptions. Majority of nurses are women, so when confronted by a female in scrubs in a setting with nurses, many patients assume they are a nurse, understandably so. I don’t think it is a purposeful slight or undermining the authority or place of respect of the female physician.

In our neurosciences department, there are 3 male physicians and 5 female, plus 2 male mid levels and 5 female. I could care less if my colleague or personal physician is a man or woman, just as long as he or she is a great doctor and team colleague, and I hope that is how most of us feel.

 

[emd123]

How should IPM address concerns about gender equity?

Every medical student deserves to be educated in an anti-bias learning environment

"Before I started medical school, I was blissfully unaware of the biases that still exist in medicine. I had heard people talk about them, but given that I spent much of my time with my head in a book, I hadn’t paid much attention. When I started my third-year clerkships, I began to see them more clearly."

She woke

 

[emd123]

There's a very easy solution to this problem. If you have an IPM department with, let's say, 9 men and 1 woman, all you have to do, is have 4 of the 'men' start 'identifying' as women. Then you have a perfectly balanced department with 5 men and 5 'women.' Gender can be changed overnight like that.

See?

Fixed.