Women: Not stupid, just deliberately obtuse
August 23rd, 2010
Female doctors are trying to figure out why they don’t advance as far as male doctors or make as much money.
Fewer than 30% of consultant posts in the health service are held by women, even though two-thirds of doctors entering the profession are female. Female doctors also earn, in general, 18% less than male doctors.
Now the British Medical Association – which represents more than 140,000 doctors and medical students — is launching a new initiative called Women in Medicine to try to boost the number of women in senior medical posts.
Great. How much is this little ploy going to cost at a time when there’s a shortage of all doctors, not just women?
How often does this subject have to come up? Seriously, every couple of months I read an article about women moaning in the workplace, and saying the working hours have to be more flexible to suit child rearing. Sorry sister, but it just doesn’t work that way in most cases.
There will of course be exceptions, but for the most part, women will put in fewer career hours in their lifetime. And if these frequent articles are anything to go on, they will be deliberately obtuse about the amount of hours they’re willing to commit to the job, yet still demand equal promotion.
I worked in the law office of a major corporation. Female lawyers would give up firm practice to come to the corporation so they could get pregnant. Seriously. In a firm, if a lawyer misses six months or a year of work, they’ll never make that time back up in billings and never be promoted. They’d have to work incessantly for years to even be considered for a partnership. But in a corporate environment, where a lawyer isn’t expected to make rain and all the clients are a sure thing, taking a year off does not destroy one’s career prospects. Women would apply for open positions withing our law department, and within 18 months they would be pregnant.
If basic physiology can’t be changed to allow men to have babies, maybe those of us with indoor plumbing should finally accept that the “you can have it all!” meme is a lie.
I switched doctors here in Toronto about four years ago, because the one I was seeing only worked part-time and wasn’t available to meet my needs. She chose to work part time because she was a mother to young kids. I chose to move on because she couldn’t meet my needs. Her children don’t have the option of finding another mother to meet their needs, so I would say the choice for everyone was clear.
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