Why saying ‘she’ and ‘her’ is just what the doctor ordered to defeat sexism

PATIENTS should start referring to doctors as “her” and “she” by default instead of “him” and “he” to end the inherent sexism attached to the job title, a leading neurologist has claimed.

Dr Elizabeth Loder, head of research at The BMJ, said it was time to start using female pronouns as the overall number of women doctors would soon overtake men.

There are 156,000 registered male doctors in Britain compared with 133,000 females, but women have already overtaken men as GPS, with 33,000 now practising compared with 27,300 men. Women now make up 55 per cent of medical students, suggesting the overall figure will soon tip over as well.

Yet despite the dramatic about-turn in the gender of doctors in recent years, Dr Loder said it was still common for people to assume that a doctor must be a man. Writing in The BMJ, Dr Loder, who is also a professor of neurology at

Harvard University, said: “Gender discrimination and harassment are serious and pervasive issues in academic and clinical medicine.

“Language reflects [this] and is part of the problem. The stereotype that doctors are men persists at a time when almost half of physicians are female, and it has been internalised by women physicians like me, so it’s a problem that needs to be fixed.

“How to do this? It would help to retire ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’ as the default pronouns for doctors and make a deliberate switch to ‘she’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’.

“When in doubt, and the gender of the doctor is unknown, let’s use female pronouns to send a message and open minds. Let’s assume that doctors are women until we know otherwise.”

Dr Loder admitted she was guilty of using the male pronoun when referring to specialists. “Last week, for example, a patient told me his cardiologist had some questions about a treatment I had recommended. ‘I’ll give him a call,’ I said. ‘Her’, corrected the patient.”

She also argued that using “they”, “them” and “theirs” was not the solution because women deserved to own the default pronoun for a while. Instead she advised that when someone says “I went to the doctor today” people should consider replying with “What did she say?”