PICTURE OF PROGRESS
Inspired by a New Yorker cover, female surgeons are snapping selfies as a show of solidarity in a traditionally male-dominated field
What does a female surgeon look like?
Obscured by her cap, mask and gown, it might be hard to tell for patients waking up in the operating room to the face of progress.
But a captivating New Yorker magazine cover this month of four women surgeons — dressed in surgical attire, only brows and eyes visible, gazing down on their patient — has sparked a surgeon selfie movement across social media from the Bay Area to Saudi Arabia.
Sister surgeons at Stanford University, UC San Francisco, UC Davis and many more are following the lead of a University of Wisconsin endocrine surgeon who re-created the image with three colleagues and posted the selfie on Twitter.
Using the hashtags #ILookLikeASurgeon and later #NYerORCoverChallenge, Dr. Susan Pitt called upon female surgeons to join the campaign to showcase how women are thriving in a traditionally maledominated field.
“When I saw the first pictures coming out, I thought, ‘That’s super cool. We’ve got to do that!’ ”said Dr. Sherry Wren, a professor of surgery at
Stanford’s School of Medicine. And she did — tweeting out her group photo.
“To me,” Wren said, “this is a celebration of women finally taking a prominent role in the field, even when some people still expect their surgeon to be male.’’
The number of women becoming board-certified surgeons has increased dramatically over the decades, according to the American Board of Surgery. In 1980, only 4 percent of the surgeons board-certified that year were female; growing to 10 percent in 1990, 20 percent in 2000, and 39 percent in 2016.
Dr. Mary Hawn, chair of Stanford’s Department of Surgery, corralled 12 of her female colleagues to join her in a kind of mega-selfie.
“Just a few of the amazing women surgeons at Stanford!” tweeted the 51year-old professor of surgery.
Not family-friendly
Back when Hawn was in medical school at the University of Michigan, relatively few women opted to become surgeons, considered the most arduous and least family-friendly of all the medical careers.
Both mentally and physically demanding — surgeons must be ready to operate 24/7, making quick, sometimes lifesaving decisions — it’s a high-stress profession.
“It’s an amazing field,” said Hawn. “The opportunity to have an immediate and significant impact on somebody’s life is like no other specialty we have.”
At UC Davis, Dr. Hilary Loge and resident Dr. Jamie Anderson last week happily joined in a quick group selfie with four female colleagues one morning before their 6:30 daily rounds.
Loge couldn’t resist after hearing from many colleagues who are not surgeons, insisting, “You have to do this!” said Loge with a chuckle.
French artist Malika Favre created the New Yorker illustration called “Operating Theatre” for the cover of the magazine’s annual Health, Medicine & the Body issue published April 3. An animated online version shows the four surgeons and their patient, blinking.
It’s not the first time the hashtag #ILookLikeA Surgeon has surfaced. That happened in 2015, inspired by the #ILookLikeAnEngineer movement started the same year by a female software developer responding to the sexist backlash over a recruitment ad in which she was featured.
Pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Marike Zwienenberg, who juggles her work at UC Davis with raising an 8-year-old son, not only knows what it’s like to be a surgeon, but also one of the few women in an even narrower subspecialty.
“The conflict for many female surgeons is family care — that’s just what it comes down to: There is only so much time in the day,” said the native of the Netherlands.
Yet she, too, made time to pose for a photo with three other neurosurgeons for a reason:
“The most empowering thing is that these pictures can show younger students that there’s a role model for them,” Zwienenberg said. “There are women out here doing this surgery. It’s possible, and if you want, you can do it, and have a life” outside, she said.
Nothing abnormal
Dr. Lucy Kornblith thinks women surgeons in the Bay Area are already seeing the results. At UC San Francisco, after all, a number of top female surgeon mentors, including Dr. Nancy Ascher, have been leading the way for years.
So when the New Yorker arrived in Kornblith’s mailbox with the four female surgeons staring her in the face, “I didn’t think anything of it, to be perfectly honest,’’ Kornblith said. “It didn’t strike me as being abnormal.”