Speakers from the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Maryland (UMD) Medical Center spoke about the challenges and accomplishments of women in medicine and surgery last Monday in Mergenthaler Hall.
The event, which was streamed online to other universities, was co-sponsored by Hopkins Feminists, The Triple Helix at Johns Hopkins, the Women’s Pre-Health Leadership Society, Alpha Epsilon Delta and the Women in Surgery Interest Group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Carlene Partow, a first-year medical student at the University of California, San Francisco who graduated from Hopkins in 2016, hosted the panel. She said that only 14 percent of plastic surgeons and six percent of neurosurgeons are women, while the number of surgeons who are women of color is too low to report.
To open discussion, Partow asked what the most important barriers are to women entering surgery.
Melanie Major, a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins Hospital, brought up the lack of female role models in the field.
“Male or female, people can provide guidance in terms of your career,” she said. “But I think getting a woman’s perspective on some of the unique professional and personal obligations you face as a surgeon would have helped me make a decision earlier.”
Major’s fellow panelist Nancy Abu-Bonsrah, the first black woman in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, added that she is confronted with inherently biased questions.
“There are very few people who look like me and have been through similar experiences, particularly in neurosurgery, that I could have looked up to,” Abu-Bonsrah said. “There were a lot of questions about how I’m going to balance my family, questions I don’t think my male counterparts would have encountered that much.”
One audience member asked about how having children and a family affects these women’s decision to go into surgery.
Dr. Bethany Sacks, the assistant program director of the department of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, described her own experience having children.
She said that she never questioned having children, but instead focused on her career goals.
“It doesn’t have to be at the forefront, and it doesn’t have to be totally put on the back burner either,” Sacks said. “Whatever happens, happens. You definitely don’t have to put that part of your life on hold to become a surgeon.”
Dr. Richelle Williams, a surgical oncology practitioner at UMD Medical Center, offered a firsthand account of the stereotyping that goes on inside the hospital, saying that a patient recently assumed she was a white man based on her name.
“I thought it was funny that that’s what she was expecting,” she said. “But to be quite honest, I’ve lived it for nine years, so it was not surprising at all.”
Partow asked Williams and Abu-Bonsrah whether they felt their blackness or gender was a greater obstacle, or whether they experienced something different entirely.
Abu-Bonsrah spoke about the weight her race holds in the medical environment and how she overcame the insecurity it initially brought upon her. She said that she would question her belonging when she was the only black person the room.
“It is important to realize that you deserve to be there,” Abu-Bonsrah said. “It’s also important to realize that the people who surround you encourage you and acknowledge your capabilities as well.”
Major explained how she could go about properly being an ally to her colleagues who are women of color.
“A good starting point is perhaps acknowledging the fact that prejudice and bias exists in our everyday life and trying to educate ourselves about those prejudices and biases in our workplace,” she said.
She also said that it is important to self-reflect and question where one’s prejudices lie and what one’s privileges are. Major said that understanding diversity was the key to connecting with their diverse patient population.
According to Williams, her mentors tended to be white men. However, she said that it didn’t matter to them that she was black or a woman, only that she got work done and learned well.
A member of the audience asked whether she adopted a more masculine persona in the workplace. Williams answered that she did not.
“I realized I wanted to be unapologetically me, even if that meant talking about something really girly in the operating room,” she said. “If you’re a female surgeon acting male to be taken seriously, you don’t get to bring in all the wonderful things a woman brings into surgery.”
Sacks pointed out that the question was indicative of gender biases ingrained in society.
“Inherent in that question is the idea that acting assertive is a male trait, but I think it’s just being a surgeon,” she said. “Surgeons are assertive. They are go-getters. That’s just how you have to be.”
