The Importance of Mentors
“Sue, I have to tell you the wildest story!”
When my best friend finished his first experience shadowing a neurosurgeon, I was ready to hear a gore-filled story, filled with heroic surgeons repairing brain hemorrhages and spinal trauma. Instead, I received an unsettling and disappointing account of an incident in the operating room.
He told me about how shocked he was, sharing uncomfortable glances with the other shadowing undergraduates, when the male surgeon asked a female nurse if she was “on her period” because she kept asking him questions. He said he was taken off guard because none of the people he surrounds himself with would ever say something like that, and he had forgotten that some men can sometimes speak in ways that are belittling and sexist.
His story left me disappointed. This is 2019. I’d been hopeful that we as a society had been working to extinguish remarks like this. To be fair, we both knew that this was probably an extreme case of one surgeon’s improper behavior. But the story stuck with me and made me wonder what let that surgeon think this was an appropriate thing to say. So I did a little research.
I found that medicine, as with many professions, is historically male-dominated. Although more women have been entering the field in the past few decades — women now comprise 20 percent of full-time medical school faculty in the United States — women have not reached senior positions in the same numbers as men. Women currently compose a minority of the authors of original clinical research. A new study has found that women applying for the first time to the National Institutes of Health for research grants win fewer grants and less money than first-time male applicants. In addition, gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment are unfortunately common in medical practice and prevalent in academic medicine.
As a woman and premed student, this scares and angers me. Inequity in medicine matters because women are equally as qualified to be medical practitioners as men and should be regarded as such. I am hoping to go to a medical school where there are women in faculty positions, so that discriminatory practices and unconscious biases are better kept in check. For example, if there were a female physician in my friend’s operating room, perhaps no one would have dared to make a gender-based joke to put down a coworker.
I want to celebrate and appreciate women in medicine. Women contribute unique gender-based perspectives to research of underrepresented medical subjects and populations. The lack of women publishing original clinical research mentioned above makes me wonder what impact this is having on future medical students, the field of clinical research, and the health care of the general public.
Who are our mentors? Our role models? According to this study, women are not advancing into leadership positions in academic medicine partly due to what is known as stereotype threat. That is when individuals who are members of a group characterized by negative stereotypes perform below their actual abilities, possibly because of anxiety about adhering to the stereotypes. And this may play an important role in the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in medicine. As someone just beginning my medical education, I feel strongly we must make spaces for women, spotting and counteracting these stereotypes, so that more women feel supported in their field.
I’m hopeful that a key part of counteracting the effects of sex segregation in academic medicine will be to increase exposure to successful female leaders. Institutional knowledge is powerful, and by having a mentor who has experienced similar struggles in clinical work due to gender, race, or ethnicity, we can build leadership efficacy among female physicians and scientists.
That’s why I really believe in WHRY’s mission to train undergraduates through mentorship. Building future leaders begins early, and I feel very privileged to be working with female researchers in my lab and working with Dr. Mazure and the other undergraduate fellows at WHRY. These successful women are showing us the way. We all just need to follow, so that one day we can be prepared to lead.
