Women in medicine - is the taboo lifting?

Posted by: Witch Doctor | June 25, 2007

Women in medicine - is the taboo lifting?

TIME TO ADDRESS THE FEMINISATION OF THE MEDICAL WORKFORCE

At last.

Feminisation of the medical workforce is coming out into the open. The BBC reports on a BMA survey calling for more flexible working hours. Dr Crippen, NHS Blog Doctor has rattled cages saying that part-time doctors are in cloud cuckoo land. Dr Rant has a different take.

Good.

Keep talking.

Keep arguing.

It is essential that the recent feminisation of he medical workforce is addressed.

Indeed, The Witch Doctor would go as far as to say that along with the European Working Time Directive, and an ageing population, feminsation of the medical workforce is the thrust behind MTAS/MMC, Agenda for Change, the introduction of the National Practitioner Escalator, the Expert Patient, and indeed almost all aspects of NHS Modernisation.

There is a major problem!

An ageing population cannot be addressed at all.

The EWTD cannot be addressed easily.

Feminisation of the Medical Workforce can be addressed up to a point.

So, this is where to start.

Dame Carol Black’s reference to the “weakening” of the medical profession due to the large female intake caused a great stir. Indeed an uproar. Governments don’t like to mention it. It is not politically correct.

Damn political correctness!!

Governments will have to mention it!

They are perfectly aware of it.

They can start off by meticulously and honestly investigating whether medicine is now discriminating against males entering medical school.

Blatant discrimination is easy to recognise and is easy to address.

There is also a shrouded, unintentional type of discrimination.

If there is even a suspicion that this is present in medicine, this must be investigated, identified and tackled too.

Now.

There is indeed a suspicion of discrimination.

The intake into medical school is sexually distorted.

What is the evidence that women make better doctors?

They don’t!!

But don’t take The Witch Doctor’s word for this. Investigate it - if you can find a way of doing this.

This may prevent an eventual 70-75% un-economical female medical workforce.

The Witch Doctor is baffled by the silence of male doctors regarding this.

Absolutely baffled!

Do male doctors feel they are inferior?

Women nowadays would vociferously question a 70% male intake into medicine.

And how!!

Categories:

Responses

The reason’s pretty obvious, Witchy! Any man saying anything like that would a) get glared at, and b) get his card marked as a de facto sexist. Bit of a potentially career limiting move for most.

I have been tangentially involved in med school admissions and over 80% of the candidates I interviewed were female. The reason? They made up more than 80% of the applicants.

For much the same reason, Asians are disproportionately represented in med school compared to the racial distribution of the population. That’s another one that no one will touch with a bargepole.

By: NLA on July 2, 2007
at 5:13 am

Well, witchdoctor. I don’t mind feminization of the workforce at all, makes work a lot more pleasant. Feels like the destructiveness of male over-ambition is lessened.

But Debbie Mellor’s plan to reshape the NHS workforve was more about promoting cheap personnel with little or no medical training which happened to be largely female, not training more female doctors. MTAS was a management tool to centrally reduce numbers of doctors. And it fulfilled this role fantastically. The tosh and spin around it were brittle, I admit.

As you said yourself, fewer males even apply for medical training to begin with. And if you check the numbers coming out of medical training, you will find that male trainees still have a much higher chance of getting a consultant post than female trainees.

I think the scandal lies elsewhere:
Ever heard of the work-life balance trust ? I think they laid the groundwork for the analysis of the state of health care in Britain in the late 1990ies, and developed much of the political drive behind labour NHS policies. But I may be mistaken.

Find out yourself:
Work-Life Balance Trust
focus on the represented groups and the complete lack of medical representation
http://www.w-lb.org.uk
http://www.w-lb.org.uk/art3.php
Debbie Mellor:
http://www.publications.doh.gov.uk/hrbulletin/hrbulletin40.htm
http://www.eurocarenet.org/allefiler/Taler1/tale23-DebbieMellor.shtm
http://www.countytraining.buckshealth.nhs.uk/Documents/01%20Debbie%20Mellor.pdf

Cheers, and have a good paranoia ride

By: supportrealworkingdocs on July 4, 2007
at 3:09 pm

NLA

Getting glared at – that’s OK. Survivable. But the men will need to form a posse to prevent the career limiting experience.

The 80% female figure is very interesting and much higher than most people would imagine. It is going to make medicine very imbalanced indeed. Of course, males notoriously do less well as teenagers at school while their hormones are in a frenzy. It may just be that more females are applying now for various reasons and, being better qualified at that stage of their lives, are pushing the male applicants down the pecking ladder.

It would be very worrying, though, if well-qualified males were turning against medicine as a career.

The question that needs to be answered is whether at the end of the day females make better doctors. Different, I imagine, but not better. And whether females are in fact intellectually superior for life! And if so, whether that should be traded off against the lower input from part time working.

50% of each is what The Witch Doctor says!!! Nice and neat and tidy!

I think the Asian discrepancy is much more complex, because cultural factors may reveal very important differences. It would be interesting to see the male to female ratio of Asian applicants and how it compares with the acceptance ratios in this group.

Thanks for your comments.

By: witchdoctor on July 4, 2007
at 11:35 pm

Thanks for the comment JG.

It strikes me that a defined work-life balance for some may be seriously wobbly for others. ie very personal - like a finger print!

Am just going to look up these links right now!

PS Not so sure about female over-ambition being less scary than male over-ambition though!

By: witchdoctor on July 4, 2007
at 11:48 pm

got me there. Of course I was thinking of a certain type of female doctor colleague.