On Gender Bias and Representation

You know the riddle:

A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies, and the boy is taken to the hospital by EMTs. But in the operating room, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy. This is my son.”

How is this possible?

Most people can’t solve this riddle. They can’t explain it because they can’t imagine the surgeon to be… a woman. The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

That so very many people should have difficulty solving this riddle will come as no surprise to women practicing medicine today. Gender bias is alive and well in American medicine. Earlier this year, a number of personal stories about gender bias, sexual harassment, and misogyny were collected on Twitter by Dr. Marjorie Stiegler. You can read them here.

A study published by JAMA in July of this year echoed these experiences. Here are the findings:

A review of 42 991 Implicit Association Test records and a cross-sectional study of 131 surgeons provided evidence of implicit and explicit gender bias. Data suggest that health care professionals and surgeons hold implicit and explicit biases associating men with careers and surgery and women with family and family medicine.

I’m hopeful, though.

Groups like the Gender Equity in Medicine Research Foundation are working hard to study and address the workplace equity issues facing the medical community. I have no doubt that these sorts of initiatives will have wide-reaching effects, also informing the representation and public perception of women in medicine.

Through research and policy and intentional representation, the tides will turn. My five-year-old grand-nephew, who is often surrounded by women in medicine, once asked me if boys were allowed to be doctors, too. And when presented with the riddle, he didn’t hesitate for a moment when offering an answer as to how the surgeon was in relation to the boy. “That’s easy,” he laughed. “It’s his mom! Or it’s his other dad! Or it’s his mom!”