{"id":643663,"date":"2026-08-18T13:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/643663\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T13:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:52:11","slug":"women-doctors-can-face-uphill-battle-to-become-leaders-in-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/643663\/","title":{"rendered":"Women doctors can face uphill battle to become leaders in medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

As of 2023, women accounted for over half \u2014 55 percent \u2014 of US medical students and 45 percent of medical school faculty members, but only 25 percent of department chairs, according to a 2025 article in JAMA Network Open<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A 2024 article in the same journal<\/a> found that \u201cCompared with men, women [medical school] deans reported having to work harder to advance, while receiving less support and opportunities for leadership positions by their own institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muto recalls that about a decade ago a surgeon arrived in town who targeted a well-loved female chief of surgery. He saw her \u201ccase volume, and wanted it.\u201d What came next, said Muto, was a \u201csham peer review,\u201d a practice in which a colleague falsely accuses a doctor of misconduct on the job.<\/p>\n

As a colleague, Muto reviewed the cases in which the chief of surgery was accused of a breach in the standard of care. She said she found there was none. \u201cShe just happened to be on call for a couple of complicated patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the ordeal was too much for the chief of surgery. She resigned, then left medicine. <\/p>\n

Muto once considered becoming chief of surgery at a hospital. When she met resistance from leadership, she started a company instead.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, she found herself at conferences with other female doctors. \u201c\u200aI started to talk to women, and we started to share our stories. And everyone had the same story.\u201d When the women spoke, she said, they talked about \u201ceverything from sexual harassment to personal harassment to sham peer reviews. And then you realized: \u2018Oh my God, this problem is national.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this surprises Sarah Temkin, a surgeon and the director of the documentary \u201c1001 Cuts\u201d about challenges facing female surgeons.<\/p>\n

Temkin once served as a hospital division director, in charge of gynecologic oncology. But she said, \u201cEven though I had a title, I called it \u2018responsibility without authority.\u2019\u201d Temkin said that women commonly raise safety concerns, but they are often not listened to.<\/p>\n

Both peers and mentors advised her to get a man to raise important issues in the hospital. Being a health care leader who lacks authority is \u201ca terrible position to be in because you\u2019re responsible for people\u2019s lives,\u201d said Temkin.<\/p>\n

Temkin emphasizes that it\u2019s not just men who view men as natural leaders. She has witnessed women bullying other women, but she said talking about it can be \u201ctaboo.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dr. Clara Keegan, a family doctor and associate professor at the University of Vermont\u2019s Larner College of Medicine, notes that more women than men are becoming doctors. But \u201cthere is definitely a gap both in compensation and in positions in academic leadership,\u201d she said. \u201cAs you move up the leadership, the percentage that are women becomes smaller and smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keegan notes that \u201c\u200aon chair searches that I\u2019ve been on, one of the things on the rubric that we\u2019re supposed to evaluate people on is their \u2018chair presence,\u2019 and I think that that is the sort of place where a bias can come in.\u201d<\/p>\n

In part, that\u2019s because men are often viewed as better \u2014 or more natural \u2014 leaders. A 2019 study<\/a> by researchers at Washington University found that \u201chealth care professionals and surgeons hold implicit and explicit biases associating men with careers and surgery, and women with family and family medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many female physicians believe they are targeted for the sort of assertiveness that would be admired in a man \u2014 or at least tolerated. Dr. Pringl Miller, founder of the advocacy group Physician Just Equity<\/a>, which provides peer support to physicians, frequently works with doctors, particularly women, who fear for their livelihoods because of sham peer reviews<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Doctors from across the country turn to Miller\u2019s organization, and the mistreatment that Miller sees takes a variety of forms, she said, including \u201cbullying, harassment, discrimination, retaliation. And it\u2019s pervasive.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are other issues. Temkin believes that \u201csexual harassment<\/a> is ubiquitous,\u201d and, for women on the path to leadership, \u201cit\u2019s another way that women have their confidence undermined. Or it can force women to change jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Temkin herself was sexually harassed by an operating room technician who leered and made inappropriate comments, she said she wasn\u2019t sure what to do. \u201cYou don\u2019t know if you should report it or not, because you don\u2019t know if it\u2019s going to affect patient care. You don\u2019t know if it\u2019s going to affect your own career.\u201d<\/p>\n

As women gain more power, Temkin believes that the nature of the discrimination they experience changes. \u201c\u200aThe sexual harassment and some of the little digs may be worse while women are younger,\u201d she said. \u201cBut as women gain expertise and rise into leadership positions, they\u2019re much more likely to experience frank discrimination, which limits their ability to be successful in their leadership position.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many women end up quitting, resulting in enormous losses for patients, said Miller. She notes that female doctors often have superior results \u2014 a 2023 JAMA article<\/a> found that patients of female surgeons were less likely to die, be readmitted, or have major complications after surgery. She argues that it hurts medical outcomes when women are pushed out or leave because of mistreatment. <\/p>\n

In 2015, one physician \u2014 who asked that some identifying details remain anonymous because of potential repercussions \u2014 was the chief of anesthesiology at a community hospital in Massachusetts. She had held the position for about seven years, until her boss approached her one day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe administration doesn\u2019t like your facial expression,\u201d she remembers him saying. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to step down.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was shocked. She believed that a man would never have been talked to that way. Before she immigrated to the United States from Europe, the physician said, \u201cI had this vision of America, or the thought of America, that it\u2019s amazing and everything is fair.\u201d But being a woman in medical leadership proved more complicated than she had anticipated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are more women going into medicine than men for the first time in history,\u201d noted the anesthesiologist. \u201cSo if you discourage or mistreat the women physicians, they\u2019re going to give up, they\u2019re going to go part-time, they\u2019re going to retire early, and then society loses.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important for the health care system to take this issue seriously.<\/p>\n

In 1970, when fewer than 8 percent of doctors were women, losing a substantial number of them didn\u2019t significantly alter the workforce. But now, Temkin said, \u201cif women make up 50 percent of the physician workforce, and we\u2019re forcing out 20 percent of them because of these issues related to culture and the way that we treat women, then that becomes a real systems problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the increase in the number of female doctors that makes the bullying and harassment of women in medicine particularly concerning, with ramifications for the environment within hospitals, the quality of care administered, and the doctors available to administer it.<\/p>\n

Fixing the problem will require attention from leaders in academic medicine, professional organizations, hospitals, and government. It\u2019s a problem that will not solve itself, and that should not depend on women risking their careers to tell their stories.<\/p>\n

Kara Miller is the host of the podcast It Turns Out. Send comments to kara.miller@globe.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As of 2023, women accounted for over half \u2014 55 percent \u2014 of US medical students and 45…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[275],"tags":[10130,53991,272394,12773,272395,125112,7838,98096,121257,66986,272396,5960,59642,9778,18,44070,44072,49754,27127,135,475,474,5489,19,99908,17,3255,3521,6064,693,2791,1595,1601,40002,272397,12817,51754,6330,18560,3887,92819,19599,35435,36956,92,94,77999,9223],"class_list":["post-643663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-adult","tag-ambulance","tag-asking","tag-care","tag-certificate","tag-cheerful","tag-close","tag-complaints","tag-consultant","tag-consulting","tag-diagnose","tag-diagnosis","tag-discussion","tag-doctor","tag-eire","tag-exam","tag-expertise","tag-form","tag-hand","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-history","tag-ie","tag-ill","tag-ireland","tag-life","tag-lifestyle","tag-male","tag-medical","tag-office","tag-patient","tag-person","tag-pills","tag-pointing","tag-portrait","tag-prescription","tag-problem","tag-record","tag-retirement","tag-scrubs","tag-sick","tag-symptom","tag-talk","tag-therapy","tag-treatment","tag-visit","tag-woman"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}