Female radiologists: Does gender really matter?

Feb 12, 2012

2012 02 10 10 57 07 335 Anagha Parkar 70

As a female radiologist myself, I staunchly believed for many years that gender does not matter. But recently I have come to realize that it does.

Before you start preparing an angry response, please hear me out. Six years ago, the percentage of female medical students in Norway passed 60% and this has remained stable every year since. This despite the Norwegian Medical Students Association in 2,005 requesting medical faculties to try to recruit more male students and aim at a 50% distribution.¹ This change in demographics poses a great challenge for certain areas in medicine, especially the surgical fields.

Dr. Anagha Parkar is a radiologist at Haraldsplass Diakonale Sykehus in Bergen, Norway.

For some reason, recruitment of female doctors into surgical fields is poor. There must be an unspoken view that people in charge hold that a woman cannot be a good surgeon. This is rather peculiar, as no one bats an eye when the gynecologist or obstetrician is a woman, despite the fact they perform many surgical procedures, from emergency cesarean sections to long-drawn cancer operations. When discussing this with a colleague in Belgium, he immediately said, "Surgeons only want women who hand in their uterus in a box before they start."

This may be true on the continent. In Norway and Scandinavia generally, many male doctors, be it radiologists or surgeons, share their "paternity" leave equally with their spouses. In my experience, the only men who do not share are the ones with wives in between jobs, which means a loss of income. So losing women to motherhood should no longer automatically disqualify, nor should being male automatically qualify for entrance into a surgical field.

This development had led to the Norwegian Surgical Society finally acknowledging the unequal recruitment. They recently decided to change recruitment practice.² If current practice continues, the dwindling pool of male trainees will cause major recruitment problems. To put it bluntly: rather a suitable female surgeon than an unsuitable male surgeon.

The orthopedic surgeons were ahead of their time. They examined the views of young professionals regarding work-life balance. In 2007, they announced they have to support the values of the younger colleagues and be ready to adjust the workload of orthopedic surgeons during pregnancy, otherwise recruitment will suffer in the long run.³

So why do I, a radiologist and not a surgeon, care?

Some fields in radiology are very close to surgical fields -- for instance, general intervention and neurointervention. I do not have any official demographics, but as far I have observed, there are far more women in pediatric radiology and very few in general interventional and neurointerventional radiology.

I presume that interventionalists will meet the same problems surgeons fear if current recruitment practice continues. Is radiology ready for this? What is the gender distribution in your country?

Regardless, I hope that radiologists who currently hire and recruit today will learn "gender blindness" and assess only skills, knowledge, and aptitude in potential trainees. We need to change in order to survive in the future and continue to provide good quality service in both general and neurointerventional radiology.

So to rephrase my question: Female radiologists, does it still matter now?

Dr. Anagha Parkar is a radiologist at Haraldsplass Diakonale Sykehus in Bergen, Norway. She is also a member of AuntMinnieEurope.com's Editorial Advisory Board.

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