- Joined
- Oct 10, 2011
- Messages
- 8,624
- Reaction score
- 10,698
Here's how this works:
First of all, the idea there's no outright sexism or discrimination in the rad onc community is wrong. I'm happy for you if that's been your experience. My experience includes being told that the reason there aren't so many women in rad onc is that it requires being good at math and comfortable with computers; that my presence as the only female resident in the program really put a damper on the jokes they could tell in didactics; and witnessed textbook sexual harassment of clinic staff even younger & more vulnerable than me but didn't feel safe enough in my own status to call it out. These 3 examples are from 3 different individuals in leadership positions across multiple institutions, so not a solitary "bad apple." My biggest frustration with the #womenwhocurie "movement" is that they're still too beholden to the same power structure, too concerned with not themselves getting on the wrong side of these same people, to stand up and say, "This is the 21st century, girls are not bad at math or computers & saying otherwise to female med students interested in the field is bad leadership that's hurting this field." I'm too afraid of retaliation for being "not collegial" to even write out the equivalent for the other categories of offenses, lest I be quoted & someday doxxed. I guarantee I am not the only one with these experiences & others probably have worse. The reason you've never heard these stories is that we are afraid for our livelihoods if we do anything other than smile and nod when you say, "Well, I've never experienced any overt sexism." The paucity of tales being told is not for a good reason, it's because things are even worse than if this stuff were happening but we felt safe enough to complain about it.
But even for women who didn't run into such charming characters, there's a legitimate connection between gender issues and other problems like the current job market:
The whole idea of diversity, inclusion, historically advantaged & disadvantaged groups is that there are some things everyone needs or concerns everyone has in common - because we're all people - but to whatever extent things aren't perfect or there are problems, minority or disadvantaged groups consistently get hit worse than others. And when things improve, these same groups often don't benefit proportionately (or are sometimes systematically excluded from the improvement). So it can be and is the case BOTH that the job market is globally bad and this is bad for everyone, and that women are being hit especially hard and attention should be paid to making sure any "fixes" are helpful to them as well as the majority group.
How and why do women (or whatever minority/disadvantaged group) get hit harder by problems relevant to everyone? It's a combination of two things. First is whatever degree there may be of conscious or unconscious discrimination among people/parties directly involved in the problem. As above, I hope we can dispense with the idea that none of this exists in rad onc. And there are plenty of more subtle versions that nevertheless result in training programs or mentors being less invested in female residents' career development, practices & hiring committees feeling more comfortable with male job applicants when sitting down for an interview, etc.
The second mechanism is that the same group (women) is disadvantaged in various ways in the larger culture, outside rad onc, so even if rad onc were a perfect haven of gender equality, the women have to deal with its issues as an addition to the problems of being a woman in a wider sexist culture, whereas the men aren't carrying that burden. (This is why the dynamics don't flip to a perfect mirror image when a medical specialty becomes heavily female-dominated, like pediatrics or ob/gyn. Internally the balance might, but what ppl are living with in the wider world outside work does not). The OP is describing a problem of exactly this sort. Yes, people choose their individual spouses/partners, but you have to choose each other reciprocally, and it's well documented that in modern American society, as a woman gains in educational attainment & income, the pool of men who consider her a desirable partner decreases (whereas for men, more education & income increase the pool of women who consider them a desirable partner). So women have to make a tradeoff between education/income & marriagability, men do not. The OP - and, she posits, other women in rad onc - is struggling with dealing with the tradeoff of "geographic determinability" (which I'm not sure I accept as a real word yet) for the privilege of practicing rad onc as it's layered on this other tradeoff of potential partners for the privilege of higher education & income. Put more simply, she truly might not have had the option to to "marry an NP [herself]" even if she made job portability high priority in a spouse - NPs tend statistically to lose interest in marrying us when we become doctors (ok, I don't think the survey has been broken down to medical professionals specifically, but that's what the overall trends would suggest).
Note that mechanism #2 is not a good reason to exclude women from rad onc, on some perverse grounds that we already have "women's issues" to worry about. It's a good reason to make sure your part in the wider culture, life beyond the work realm, is contributing as little to said issues as possible.
It's hard for everyone out there right now, that's a problem.
Whatever it is out there, it's a touch harder if you're a woman or underrepresented minority, always.
I'm far from having the worst position in this whole situation, btw, but gender issues have definitely made it harder than it should have been, and understanding these dynamics helps me have empathy for others
Completely agree with essentially all of this. Thanks for posting.
