Our thanks to Jeff for this. What starts out as an intelligent and promising article descends into offensive sexist comments about the relative impacts of men and women on workplaces, and ends with this:
Medicine should be seen as a vocation, and with this comes the harsh reality that your patients have to be your priority.
It’s not sexist to point this out, and I don’t think this is a reason for fewer women to go into medicine. But it is a reason to think hard about the way we work.
I know some women doctors who have decided their choice of career simply precludes motherhood. Others, quite reasonably, think that’s too extreme — and make it practical by renegotiating roles at home.
After all, if you’re a female brain surgeon and your husband works in marketing, why should you be the one who has to give up when a baby arrives? Surely, when men have less important jobs, they should take on the childcare.
Flexible thinking — by both individuals and the NHS as a whole — is the only way forward. Otherwise, the welcome feminisation of our health service will simply cause greater and greater problems.
So that’s what we need. Not fewer female doctors and more male doctors, but ‘flexible thinking’. Well, that’s going to make legions of female doctors switch from part-time to full-time working, isn’t it? Give me strength.
Justice for Men & Boys 
Naturally it’s the men who must think flexibly and not the women whose choices have made flexible thinking necessary. This is simply more of the same old ‘men’s obligation to provide women with what they are entitled to’ nonsense and nothing to do with equality.
That aside, I wonder how many female brain surgeons there actually are.
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Here’s a flexible idea. How about applying a sliding scale to doctors salaries? Say for instance we pay those who work 20 hours per week an annual salary of £25,000, those who work 30 hours per week £50,000 and those who work 40 hours £85,000.
That might provide the incentive for them to put in an honest week’s work instead of bleeding the taxpayer because it’s clear that at present that they are grossly overpaid, to the extent that they feel that they can make enough money by working part-time.
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Interesting. Alternatively, have them pay back the cost of their training over, say, 20 years – whether or not they pursue a medical career?
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Something I’ve advocated for some time. Medical students should also have to sign an agreement to work full-time, within the NHS, for a minimum period – say twenty years – failure to do so leading to being struck off.
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“Interesting. Alternatively, have them pay back the cost of their training over, say, 20 years – whether or not they pursue a medical career?”
Do what the malaysian government did( not sure if it still does though) for all students in certain fields such as medicine that had their education/training paid for.
once you graduated you owed the goverment. the govenment then sends you to a postion that needs filling( usually somewhere remote) in order to fufill its obligation to the population to provide medical services. You were of course still paid well, and after 5 years you were free to go wherever you wanted. It was a win win as the medical students/ doctors had a job to go to when they graduated, the proven confidence in their ability as doctors, the government got the much needed medical services for everyone
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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mike
if it is of any interest to you on this
caught someting on avfm( in the last few days) about pakistan wanting/bringing in changes to the balance of medical student in medical school. it was something like 72% were women, but they weren’t all going into practice and some were only doing a few years. The impact of course was fewer doctors for the country and given the finite space in the number of places in a school you can’t simply add more students without buidling new schools which incurs more costs to the country.
One of the reason claimed for this situation was that having the status of doctors made women more attractive in the marriage stakes.
with regard to the UK. my idea of flexible thinking is that a couple work it out between with regards to who does the child caring. Maybe that would kick the family court up the backside everytime we hear about the chidls primary carer.
But within the NHS if you want time out to raise kids then you have to accept why you shouldn’t be allowed back in unless you have contributed enough of the ROI that the NHS has invested in you. this applies equally to men and women. If various groups don’t like this then too bad, perhaps they personally would like to stump up the investment cost in training for women who cut their careers too early to raise a family rather than to look at the rest of the taxpayers. all this does is make women less attractive to any employer because they worry about the lack of commiitment, not helpful to women at all.
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