A survey of medical students, residents and attending physicians showed there are cultural and systemic barriers within medicine that make it difficult for individuals who want to have families to have them, esp for individuals who need to utilize alternate pathways to parenthood like, adoption, fostering, surrogacy and fertility treatment.
Barriers include the very long training period that medicine requires, a period that overlaps with a woman’s peak fertility years. Respondents mentioned that they felt pressured to delay childbearing until after residency and early attending hood while they completed training and established their careers. Short, unclear or non-existent personal leave policies and lack of clarity about insurance coverage (for fertility treatment, surrogacy, fostering) were also cited as reasons along with the unavailability of affordable childcare.
Interpersonal reasons were also cited. Individuals who were expecting a child or who had children face hostility and discrimination from their peers at work who feel overextended when an individual takes parental leave, leaving them to pick their missing physician’s workloads.
The survey found that some individuals who want families decide to forego them because of the difficulties medicine as a career places in their way.
Yes, like a career in BigLaw (or working as a federal prosecutor), law enforcement (particularly the FBI), Intelligence (CIA, Interpol, NSA) and academia are all very difficult to balance with having children.
Yes it is. But in the other careers mentioned above (and I’m sure there are more), you’re still “under training” / learning in the first several years on the job. Time away from the workplace has a similar impact on career.
It is very common for physicians in surgical subspecialties to be still in training (residency/fellowship) with commensurate hours and salaries when they are in their mid to late thirties. Is that true for other professions?
Want a job as a federal prosecutor? Three years of law school. These days, two years (or more) at a prestigious Big Law firm. One year clerking for a federal circuit judge, then a second year for an appellate judge. Then back to your Big Law firm for a year or two- and THEN, an entry level job in the federal government. You can fast track this by moving directly from your first clerkship to the Supreme Court… but since there are fewer than 35 people in the entire country who are serving as SCOTUS clerks in any given year, that’s not the common track (but it is possible, and it does happen). There are variations of this timeframe, but many people believe “graduate from law school with decent grades and you can always get a job at SDNY” which like saying “graduate from med school with decent grades and you’ll be leading an organ transplant team on July 1”.
There have been numerous studies on the “female penalty” in academia so I won’t summarize them… but the gist is that just when you might be transitioning from post-doc to tenure track your biological clock will be ticking loudly. And if you have kids- kiss tenure goodbye for the next 8-10 years. And if you decide NOT to have kids and kick the can down the road, just when you are supposed to be publishing like crazy and getting grants and showing up to present a paper at the IMPORTANT conferences-- your clock will be going nuts and your time will be running out.
Yes, a lawyer has long road after law school. But as soon as a lawyer graduates law school and passes the bar, that person can practice law.
A surgical resident is still a STUDENT after graduating medical school and passing the medical boards. If that surgical resident quits the residency, he/she will not be able to practice surgery. He/she will have a hard time getting ANY medical job because he/she did not complete any residency.
A resident is paid a lot less than most practicing lawyers.
All residencies are set up by the ACGME and have a uniform structure. The resident shouldn’t expect that if he/she is able to transfer to a different residency it will be any different than the current one.
No, a lawyer cannot practice law until he or she passes the bar. And the bar varies in difficulty from state to state. I know young lawyers whose firms have asked/told them they need to qualify in a few jurisdictions (so a DC lawyer needs to take the bar in Maryland, VA AND DC, and won’t have been a lawyer long enough for reciprocity).
I’m not playing “who has it harder”, lawyers or doctors. I’m pointing out that difficulty balancing a family and a career is NOT specific to medicine- it applies to many other fields. And the structural issues (long runway before hitting the ability to work autonomously, have a modicum control over your calendar) are hard to workaround.
Virtually every young female doctor I know in my community is working as a hospitalist now. That doesn’t solve the residency/fellowship problem, but it means light at the end of the tunnel.
I agree many professions have similar problems that the female physicians in medicine face. I am merely pointing out that female physicians also face unique problems that don’t exist in other professions. Yes, physicians made their career choice and there are alternative strategies to mitigate these problems.
Is being up ALL night every 4th night for months on end standard for BigLaw?
In BigTech are you expected to get your face within centimeters of the face of a fighting, febrile toddler knowing full well this kid may have CMV? Knowing full well that maternal CMV infection during pregnancy is the #1 cause of acquired deafness and mental retardation in the US?
Do law enforcement professionals typically do 4 years of college, then 1-2 years getting an application together, then 4 years to get a doctorate (while paying ~$70K/yr), then 3-7 years of residency getting paid minimum wage when the hours are taken into account?
When graduate students or academics take maternity leave, do their colleagues have to absorb all their work? (because sick people keep coming and “adjunct doctors” don’t exist)
Anybody who can’t understand why the career/parenting equation in medicine deserves its own attention has not thought about it very hard.
Yep. When my residency colleagues went on maternity leave, it became every 3rd night (because somebody has to cover.) We joked we were pretending to be old school docs like you guys.
I think it’s silly to play the “who has it harder?” game. (Someone might point out that law enforcement professionals run the risk daily of getting shot and killed).
I’m not minimizing how hard it is for female physicians.
The point is, starting a family has a negative impact to women in many careers. The challenges might be different but the career impact is similar.
Yes, I know very few female surgeons older than me, and the ones I do know have no children. Even the 3 women who became surgeons from my graduating class of ~100 – none of them had children.
The article indicates that female physician respondents didn’t realize how hard it would be for them until it was too late. They were never informed, and there is no good off-ramp in the medical training process for them to use.
Academics do research about the barriers that physicians face in family building …and commenters here get offended that the research doesn’t include lawyers, and CIA workers, and English professors.
I mean exactly nobody is standing in the way of tech workers or whoever from commissioning their own work/life balance research if they so desire. Sheesh.