I am sitting in Costa enjoying a quick cappuccino and doing what I do best - feeling guilty. I’m feeling guilty because it’s 4pm on a workday and I’m not at work. And I’m feeling guilty because I’m not with my daughter.
The fact is that being a female doctor is all about feeling guilty. Apparently we’re a ‘demographic time bomb’ because we all want to go part-time, added to which we don’t go into clinical leadership roles, and we reduce the standing of the profession. If I find this all a bit hard to take, it’s some consolation to know that I’m not alone (although that’s part of the problem, obviously) - medicine is now full of guilt-ridden women.
Medical school intake is now 56% female, up from 24% in 1961. We were discussing this during my orthopaedic list this week (percentage of female surgeons in theatre 0%). I have to admit it doesn’t seem obvious to me why I should be responsible for reducing the status of medicine more than, say, Harold Shipman.
In my experience, medicine has become a much pleasanter profession to work in as the proportion of women has increased. When I started anaesthetics, in 1988, only two of the 12 trainees were female. In theatres, there were separate changing rooms for the female and male theatre staff, a palatially proportioned facility for the male doctors, but no changing room at all for the women doctors.
The two of us had to use the cleaners’ changing room, which was the size of a small cupboard. Now, trusts are even having to provide special rooms for female doctors to express breast milk!
As to being part-time, I have to confess that when I first came back from maternity leave I worked a three-day week. But over the years it’s gradually crept back up to full time, mainly because of my pathetic inability to say “no”. I would be the first to admit there is a problem with part-time work and it’s this: once you’ve experienced life with less work, it becomes addictive. The less you do, the less you want to do.
Where once the odd half day off seemed like an unimaginable luxury, soon a four day week becomes an intolerable imposition on your time, and three days a week is only barely acceptable. I think the best arrangement would be to work just sufficient hours to break up the routine of lunches, tennis matches, manicures and whatever else non-working mothers fill their day with - perhaps about 15 hours a week.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of the manpower (womanpower?) planners to factor all this in. We would still earn more than most of the population, and with current levels of unemployment the more jobs there are to go round the better.
So male doctors are going to find themselves in the minority - the good news for them is that there will always be plenty of jobs available in the fields to which they are perhaps more naturally suited (plumbing, car maintenance, etc).
Meanwhile, I’m going to stop feeling guilty every time I steal half an hour for myself, practise saying “no” when the trust piles on more work, and dream about the day when the poor old men have to get changed in the cleaning cupboard.
Tags: Equality, Leadership, Part-time, Workforce
