Female doctors scapegoat for Canadian doctor shortage: National Post
Female doctors hurt productivity: report is the title of a National Post article discussing the impact of the increasing percentage of female physicians and medical students in Canada.
Dr. Mark Baerlocher, the study’s lead author, acknowledged he is tackling a thorny issue, but stressed he does not favour curbing the number of female physicians. Instead, the study calls for greater increases in medical-school enrolment to offset the phenomenon.
“It’s not meant to be a negative paper in any way,” he said in an interview. “It’s meant to take an objective, hard look at the work-hour differences that most people would agree are very real…. You can’t simply ignore it because it’s a sensitive issue.”
Perhaps the article is unfair to Dr. Baerlocher–neither he nor the study referenced turned up in my cursory googling–but the premise for the study and NP’s reporting both reek of sexism. According to the article, Canada is already short 20,000 doctors compared to the OECD average. The projected loss of “medical productivity” stemming from increasing representation of women physicians and medical students is only 1,600, or less than 10% of the existing shortage. Moreover, there’s no reference to any kind of nuance to this study, distinguishing productivity (defined here as hours of patient contact) between women with kids vs. those without, or whether hours of patient contact is the best metric to use in evaluating physicians, or the fact that men AND women from Gen Y are tending to place greater importance on work-life balance (although this last point is mentioned by the president of the Canadian Medical Association in rebuttal).
Look–this isn’t surprising. Women in general tend to lag behind men in career success once they have kids, in part because they put in fewer hours. If a woman wants to put her career on the back burner to spend more time with family, why should she feel guilty about it just because she’s a doctor? And really, what other field would blame an imbalance of supply and demand of this magnitude on the (implied) selfishness of wanting work-life balance?
Dr. Baerlocher proposes increasing medical school enrollment, which sounds fine, except that it’s a slow way to catch up, especially if this report of a female exodus from Canadian medicine is to be believed. In the meantime, people respond to incentives: how about providing flexible hours, better benefits, on-site childcare, or whatever it takes to make medicine more attractive to ALL people who want to have a family?
(Hat tip: KevinMD)
