A monologue in the style of America Ferrera’s character Gloria in the Barbie Movie (original script by Greta Gerwig). It is literally impossible to be a woman in medicine. You can be at the top of your class in medical school and residency, and yet you will never think you’re good enough. Like, we have to…
Comments closedAuthor’s note: The Amazon Prime show The Power, based on Naomi Alderman’s book, flips the gender power construct 180 degrees. By doing so, the show (and book) show us how when certain things happen to men, they become shocking and unbelievable. Whereas for women, it’s just our day-to-day lives. I wrote this piece as an…
Comments closedA weekly roundup of AI algorithms in the news Greetings readers! In my upcoming speculative thriller, The Algorithm Will See You Now, there’s a podcaster who dubs herself the “Algorithm Anarchist.” She’s trying to get the world to see the truth about Big Medicine conglomerate “PRIMA” — Prognostic Intelligent Medical Algorithms (but no spoilers). So…
Comments closedToday, February 3, 2023, is National Women Physicians Day! To recognize the day, I thought it would be fun to put together a roundup of my favorite blog posts on Women In Medicine over the past two years. 1. Gendered Expectations of Physician Accessibility My reflection on how my daily clinic experience is vastly different…
Comments closedI haven’t done one of these year-end round-ups before, but given 2022 marked the five year anniversary of the blog, it seemed a good year to start. For each post, I’ve selected a favorite passage to highlight (different from the preview passage you’ll see on the home page). First, the top five most read blog…
Comments closed(Spoiler warning: contains minor spoilers for the first few episodes of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power, on Amazon Prime) Galadriel, you may be the Elf Commander of the Northern Armies, the Warrior of the Wastelands, and the Lady of the woods of Lothlórien, but I am a human woman and, therefore,…
Comments closedMy patient is older and hard of hearing, and masks aren’t helping the situation. I raise my voice so he can hear me, which means I lose a lot of nuance and expression in my tone. Within a few minutes, he allows his mask to droop below his nose, as if trying to show me…
Comments closedSome years ago, I noted a trend in my practice. More and more patients requested to switch their care to me for a single reason: They wanted a doctor who would answer their emails. To my surprise, that was how I learned some of the other doctors — all male — in the practice did…
Comments closedIf you want to be taken seriously, you have to have serious hair. That line has lived in my brain since 1988. I was fifteen years old, and I was convinced Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl had revealed one of life’s secret truths. In the movie, she utters the line as she directs her…
Comments closedupdate 9/30/2019 – Honorable mention, Online/Print Article, Writer’s Digest 88th Annual Writing Competition! I recently came across an eye-opening passage on gender bias by the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The excerpt from her book is as follows: Theresa May is the British prime minister and here is how a progressive British newspaper described her husband:…
2 Comments
