Discrimination is not overt but there is a gender gap

My university year was one of the first to have equal numbers of women and men but, despite the fact more than half the UK’S medical graduates are women, a significant gender gap remains.

Only 25% of medical directors and 36% of NHS chief executives are female. Women only represent 49% of lecturers, 30% of senior lecturers and 15% of professors in UK medical schools. Encouragingly, 42% of hospital consultants are now women, but this has to improve.

It is true to say women are more likely to leave specialist training courses. Traditionally, caring roles with children and elderly parents compete with the time demanded to complete the course. Only 11% of orthopaedic surgeons are women. There are figures from surgery that show women are going into these specialities and then dropping out, so we have to ask ourselves why. Is it an unfriendly environment, exhausting on-call hours or what? While discrimination may not be overt, these work conditions do not accommodate the burden of caring roles most women still fulfil at home. Flexibility in training courses and throughout medical careers needs to be improved.

The college has worked extremely hard to address medicine’s gender gap by liaising with others to launch a leadership development programme to help nurture females in senior medical jobs.

Role models for women are important and I was lucky to have good ones in both female and male colleagues. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it and that is true of gender, ethnic origin, disability and religion. We need to instil a confidence in women to believe in themselves and know their true worth.