Women in academic medicine - challenges and issues
September 2004
Skills and values
It was generally agreed among participants that women and men have different skills and approaches to an academic career. Men are perceived to be more career orientated, ambitious and able to ‘negotiate the system’, whilst women are less assertive, lateral thinkers. Some participants suggested that on the whole, women have better communication skills and are able to juggle more tasks and responsibilities than their male colleagues. However, the ability to multi-task is often perceived as being a disadvantage for women, as it detracts from a clear and direct career path. Whilst adjectives such as ‘nice’, ‘accommodating’ and ‘sensitive’ were used in the group to describe women, ‘empire-building’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘focused’ were used to describe males in this context. Furthermore, where women are seen to be more assertive and career-minded, they are often described as ‘scary’, whilst ‘focused’ denotes the same qualities in a man. These perceptions impact significantly on the progression of women in academic medicine.
Whilst it is recognised that academic medicine is a male-dominated environment and success is largely based on male standards, the question was raised by focus group participants, ‘Why should women have to act like men to be successful?’ Instead, participants suggested that the differences in the way men and women work requires greater acceptance and recognition.
‘I do think that men have a much more career orientated mind and they see the end already right from the beginning, whereas women tend to meander a bit and 'Oh I enjoy this, so that’s fine'... Whereas men just have this focus going in a straight line.’
‘I think there are fundamental differences, although there is obviously an overlap in personality traits between males and females. From my experience, in a very male dominated specialty, they (men) are narrow minded and therefore it’s easier just to pursue what they’re following, because they’re unaware of other people’s feelings to a certain extent and can be more focused. And I think with that then comes a confidence and sometimes I don’t know if it’s just natural confidence or whether it’s an ego that has to be maintained, but as a result of that it makes it easier to achieve your goal because that’s what you’re going for’.
‘It’s also a disadvantage being a multi-tasking type personality, because it means you start to take on things that are peripheral to your central research. And I think that’s what men don’t do, because of this focus. So women tend to do a bit of this, do a bit of that, and then this is interesting so I’ll just whoomph over here, round the corner and do that as well. And I think then that actually just detracts from the straight line, which is actually the career path in medicine’.
‘I think there is a difference between the way men work and think and the way women work and think, and I don’t think that that can change. I mean there are obviously some women who think like men, Mrs Thatcher being the best example’.
‘And let’s face it, so it’s easier to put obstacles in the way of a woman compared to a man, because we are less assertive in general. And I discovered, being nice and polite, it’s interpreted as weakness. You have to show aggressiveness every now and then, unfortunately, which means really being trained to do that’.
Networking
One of the recognised barriers to the career progression of women in academic medicine is not knowing or being able to approach the ‘right people’ (Blake, M and La Valle, I, 2000. Who applies for Research Funding?- key factors shaping funding application behaviour among men and women in British higher education institutions. London: National Centre for Social Research.) Networking and raising one’s profile are perceived as being skills which are particularly difficult for many women in the context of academic medicine. It is suggested that women are often not as visible as their male colleagues at conferences or meetings and that this is due to the lack of assertiveness of many women and the negative perception of women who do take the lead in their field. Assertiveness among women is often interpreted as being ‘pushy’ and several participants express apprehension and unwillingness to take on this role. The largely male-dominated nature of many of these events further deters many women from pursuing this role.
‘I’ve just been to an international meeting and of 64 oral presentations, only eight were made by women, and of the invited ones, which was about half of those talks, only one was a women who’d been invited. And it was an area where people are discovering new genes for things and the genes had been discovered by women, who’d written papers, but they weren’t being asked to talk about it because they weren’t, I guess, the ‘right’ people’.
‘In my experience a lot of networking takes place at conferences, normally in the small hours in the hotel bar or what have you...men are sort of encouraged to go up and network and all the rest of it, and that’s the done thing. And I think sometimes as a woman if you do that you’d probably be considered as quite pushy or whatever’.
‘My male boss has certainly introduced me to the key names in the field when we’ve been at conference together, but if we’re not together then my inclination to go forward is very reduced. The other thing is that, talking about pushing forward to present at conferences, I think it’s not just about being invited, I’ve also wondered whether it’s women not pushing forward to say, when you tick the boxes on the conference application form, I always go ‘poster’, I never say ‘or oral if you want me’, it’s just like I don’t do that, and I don’t know whether that’s a male/female thing, but I suspect partly it might be’.
‘Maybe because when you have a group of males standing together talking and you have to walk into that arena it’s much easier if there was another woman there, because, I don’t know, I think I would feel much more comfortable walking in if there was one other woman. I know it has always helped if there was one other woman there’.