Jarrod Shapiro, DPM
Sexism in Medicine

When you see a woman in scrubs, do you assume she is a nurse I'm not an expert on this subject, but lately a couple of issues have come up, and I feel it important to discuss sexism in medicine. Like most of you, I work with quite a few women, several of whom are physicians.

Recently one of my female partners told me about an incident she experienced in the past. At a prior job, she was seeing a patient who didn't seem to buy what she was saying. Suspecting this patient didn't believe her because she was a woman, she asked another doctor next door to come over and essentially repeat what she was telling the patient.

What was the gender of the other doctor, you ask? Well, a male of course. And what was the result?

Sexism In Medicine You guessed it – the patient believed what the other doctor was saying. Is this because he was a male and my partner was a female? Hard to say, of course. I then witnessed firsthand the same thing happen to her again, but with me as the male doctor.

Similar situation – she was trying to convince a patient to undergo a surgical procedure. He seemed to balk at the recommendation, so my partner asked me to come meet the patient, take a look and give a second opinion because she felt I would eventually meet him in an emergency room when he had a complication as a result of declining the surgery.

I took a look at the patient and came to the exact same conclusion my partner had: he needed surgery sooner rather than later. At the time not realizing the possibility of sexism, I proceeded to explain what would happen to the patient if he didn't do as my partner recommended. After perhaps a minute, he changed his mind and signed up for the surgery.

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At the time, I had no idea that these events could have been related to sexism against my partner. It wasn't until we talked about this topic at a completely unrelated time that I realized the possibility.

Let me make something clear here. I'm a white male. Obvious if you look at my picture. "So what," you ask? "What does your being a white male have to do with this?"

If you're asking this question, I'll bet you're also a white male. If you're a minority of any sort or a female, then you know exactly what my partner went through with each of these situations and likely several others over your professional career, if not before that. You see, as a white male, I've almost never experienced sexism (or racism for that matter). In the past, I have been discriminated against as a white male in a – previously – white male dominated society. However, this is something I have experienced on a very rare occasion. If anything, I've been discriminated against because I'm Jewish rather than my gender or race. This means that I don't walk around looking for this ridiculous kind of behavior. If it almost never happens to me, then I'm never geared to look for it. Which is why I completely missed the sexism in the episode I described above until much later, when it came up in conversation.

Now, some of you reading this might think, "So what? Big deal. If someone discriminates against me in my practice, I can just kick them out or not deal with them." If this thought came into your head at all, then you are currently as clueless as I was at that moment I described. There are several issues we need to consider to understand the insidious effect of sexism on our female colleagues.

First, some of the manifestations of sexism are not as overt as calling someone a nasty name or coming outright and saying, "Don't touch me." My partner's experience was much more surreptitious than that. The patient may not even have been thinking anything consciously about her gender. That makes this kind of thing much more difficult to recognize and address. If my partner had called the patient out on his behavior, she would have looked like a lunatic and would have, at the very least, alienated the patient and likely would have caused him to leave. How could she have proven the behavior was sexism? She couldn't.

How about something just slightly more overt – making an overgeneralization. My partner explained to me that if she is out in public in scrubs from the hospital, others will assume she is a doctor only because she drives a nice car. She asserts that before she drove a "doctor's" car, people would assume her scrubs meant she was a nurse. Sound like nonsense to you? Then you must be a male. I've seen this one in action with one of my other female work colleagues. I watched someone ask if she was a nurse (she was dressed in scrubs at the time).

Overgeneralizations are dangerous. What do you think if you see a white male in scrubs driving a nice car? Doctor, right? Why does that have to be true? What if he's a nurse who is able to afford a nice car? Doesn't seem so impossible, right? Turn this around and switch the gender. How many of us are now guilty of thinking the opposite? Why don't we assume a female in scrubs and a regular car is a doctor? I happen to have three female residents who drive regular cars. Be careful with the overgeneralizations; they're very blunt instruments.

Another problem with this is that the doctor-patient relationship is built on trust. When these types of episodes occur, what does it say about the level of trust the patient has for the female doctor? He's OK with this "lady doctor", but really believes the male "authority"? How stupid is that thought process? I think it's sad that my partner and all of my female colleagues have to deal with this crap.

Let me say that the partner I've been discussing is an excellent physician and surgeon. She's responsible, smart, has excellent judgment, strong experience, and very good hands. I know this because I've seen her in action, and I've seen her results. For someone to think she needs a man to validate her opinion is incredibly stupid. For this accomplished female physician, who works her butt off to balance work and family while taking outstanding care of her patients, to be exposed to the possibility of losing her confidence due to sexism would be a travesty. And for any of our female colleagues to live with this kind of discrimination in modern society tells us that we have a long way to go.

So, to you men out there, here's one man's advice to the rest of you:

Don't discriminate. If you treat your female colleagues as "less than", then it's actually you that's less than.
Watch out for your female colleagues. Don't be as blind as I was. Take your head out of the sand and realize discrimination still exists.
Understand and stay conscious of the differences that exist between men and women and the inherent difficulties with each. For example, remember that when the female doctor has a child, she can't just walk out of the house like you can. She's a doctor Mom too and that's a lot harder than being a doctor Dad.
If you see discrimination, then talk about it with your colleague. Let her know you're there to support her, but don't worry. You don't need to come to her aid. She's figured out long ago how to handle herself without you saving her.