Contributing Writer
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Jessa is a second-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, TN, class of 2022. In 2017, she graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in biology with a minor in international studies. She enjoys running, reading, and painting in her free time. In the future, Jessa would like to pursue a career in general surgery or OB/GYN
It’s a common scenario: a male medical student and a female resident walk into a patient’s room together, and the patient automatically assumes that the man is the doctor, and the woman is the nurse.
The majority of medical school graduates are women, but the minority of surgeons and surgical trainees are women. The one thing that transcends all cultures appears to be a global sluggishness to welcome women into the surgical ranks.
I recently attended a panel entitled “Women in Surgery,” where medical students had the opportunity to ask female surgery residents how they navigate what is still a mostly male-dominated field and hear their take on that ever-elusive “work-life balance.”
Black hellebore, a flower of the deepest black and with petals the sinister shape of blunted arrowheads, grows wild in the cool, mountainous regions of the Balkans. Despite its unintimidating label as the “Christmas rose,” the hellebore has a much darker history, one bespoken more by the flower’s ebony hue than by its innocuous nickname.
In 2015, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research published an alarming statistic: on average, women made only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men. Even more alarming was the fact that when the study controlled for qualification or stratified by job title, the gender wage gap persisted. Unfortunately, medicine is not immune to the gender wage gap phenomenon. According to data from the US Census Bureau, women make up one-third of US physicians, but on average make only 69 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues. This results in over $56,000 in potential wages lost for women in medicine each year.
In light of this recent occasion, I would like to draw attention to the sexual harassment of a particularly vulnerable population that is a result of a unique power dynamic: they have no income, they have amassed significant debt and they depend on the subjective opinion of their abusers for validation of their work. Most frustrating, is that many of the corrective actions taken over the last 25 years have had a limited effect on changing this specific culture of abuse. This specific population is medical students.
These words, spoken by Dr. Gabrielle McMullin, a vascular surgeon in Australia, refer to a recent case wherein a female surgical resident won a case against a surgeon accused of sexually assaulting her in the Melbourne hospital where they both worked. Ironically, winning this workplace harassment lawsuit has made it impossible for the surgical resident, Caroline Tan, to find a job. In the surgical profession, speaking up against assault has resulted in Tan being labeled not as a victim or a brave woman who spoke up, but as a troublemaker.
Administrative assistant, nurse and high school volunteer were just a few of the titles people assumed I was when they saw me sitting in the office of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Often to their surprise, I was a medical student starting my summer research project between my first and second year. It became immediately clear that seeing a young woman associated with orthopedic surgery was not something many people were used to.
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