Sexism in medicine is a public health issue

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Author.  President.  Teacher.  Doctor.  These are all gender-neutral words which happen to relate to a person’s profession.  However, I find it particularly interesting that while “doctor” is a gender-neutral word, the field of medicine is riddled with institutional sexism.

Let me begin by explaining that I am a military physician currently training to become a gastroenterologist.  If being the only woman in any room bothered be, my journey would imply that I am a sadomasochist.  But it’s still a hard pill to swallow when a program director asks me if I have children, a recruiter asks if I will be interested in part-time positions after I graduate, or a patient asks how a “little girl like you” chose such an indelicate field.

While I understand that inequalities and biases are within the threadwork of the human social experience, and not unique to medicine, it is safe to say that somewhere along the way, sexism became normalized in medicine.  Historically, hysterectomies were first performed, at times involuntarily, to cure hysteria, a once-common medical diagnosis reserved exclusively for women, which is no longer regarded as a medical diagnosis.  The behavior and actions of women were reduced to the sequelae of our reproductive organs for several hundreds of years.

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