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July 1996
Volume 60 |
Number 7
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PROFESSIONAL DIVERSITY
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| From Gender to
Cultural Equity: The Mission of the Committee on Professional
Diversity |
Rosemarie M. Johnson, M.D.
Committee on Professional Diversity
The first international symposium highlighting women anesthesiologists'
issues was held at the 11th World Congress of Anaesthesiologists
on April 17, 1996, in Sydney, Australia. The half-day program included
cultural and gender topics facing women in the United States, United
Kingdom, Australia, Nigeria, India and Russia.
Caryl J. Guth, M.D., from the United States was co-chair of planning
with Diana S. Khursandi, M.D., the Australian who orchestrated the
symposium. The American contingent was completed by Elizabeth A.M.
Frost, M.D., who presented "I Need a Wife"; Selma H. Calmes,
M.D., speaking on the single life; and Rosemarie M. Johnson, M.D.,
speaking on leadership. But it was the presentations of our colleagues
from other lands that support the direction on which the Committee
on Professional Diversity should embark.
Women and men are products of the cultural ideologies in which they
and generations of their family members before them have been steeped.
Today, gender equity and equal opportunities in the workplace are
not so much based on gender as on cultural bias. It is said that
women will be free to leave home to work only when men are free
to stay home. Men are constrained by societal expectations as much
as women. Our colleagues from Nigeria and India helped elucidate
this opinion.
Nigeria, a western African nation of about 100 million people, has
slightly more women than men, but 98 percent of households are male-dominated.
Four percent of women receive higher education; 50 percent receive
no formal education whatsoever. If money is tight in the home, the
male children will go to school first. A woman's priorities are
completely structured for her; being a housewife and mother is expected
first and foremost. The woman must cook her husband's meals personally,
even if she works outside the home as hard or harder than her husband
and even if household help is affordable. If a professional woman
asks for outside help, the husband may retort that she is too committed
to her work. There is relentless family pressure to have children;
the average Nigerian woman has six children; the average Nigerian
female physician, three children.
Thirty percent of anesthesiologists in Nigeria are women, and the
first professor of anesthesiology at the University of Legos was
an inspiring leader of our specialty, Shirley Fleming, M.D. Thanks
to her, the image of female anesthesiologists throughout western
Africa is strong and positive, but unfortunately, most of them today
occupy the bottom of the academic pyramid. About 60 percent of academics
are women, not because they have excelled but because men often
leave the country for better professional opportunities. The Nigerian
speaker at the symposium, Dorothy Crabbe, M.D., herself a charismatic
and gifted leader, is one of three full professors of anesthesiology
at the university. Each makes $3,000 a year in salary. Her trip
to Sydney, Australia, subsidized through the World Congress, cost
$5,000.
Pramila Chiari, M.D., a recent past president of the Indian Society
of Anesthesiologists, presented a different historical and cultural
situation for Indian women. During India's struggle for freedom
led by Mohandes K. Ghandi, women participated fully, and consequently
when independence was won in 1947, the right to vote, equal pay
and equal access to education were awarded to both sexes. Today,
women occupy the highest positions in science, education and administrative
fields. More women than men have attended medical school in India
during the past 10-15 years. Sixty percent of female physicians
marry, a quarter of them to other professionals, and the average
professional couple has two children.
Cultural constraints are not as severe for the Indian professional
woman as for Nigerian women. Grandparents and other family members
willingly baby-sit; household help is common, and extended maternity
leave is the norm. All is not perfect for these women, however.
Indian men may feel superior and may not take orders well from women
or help around the house.
In anesthesiology in India, women comprise 40 percent of practitioners
and 30 percent of academic department chairs, with two to three
senior women in every department. Sixty percent are engaged in teaching,
30 percent in administration and only a few in research because
women still have extensive responsibilities at home and are not
free to extend work hours or travel for professional activities.
Balancing the story of women professionals in these settings are
the equally constraining but opposite expectations imposed on men.
Understanding the cultural backgrounds behind the traditional division
of labor in society will free men and women from these gender-based
expectations and maximize the development of everyone's talents.
Women have practice and leadership styles that will enhance a male
professional's skills, and the vice versa is true as well.
Let us share these talents to create fuller professional and personal
lives. At meetings -- from a local department to our national and
international educational meetings -- let us emulate the successful
interpersonal and negotiating skills of both sexes. The Committee
on Professional Diversity would like to offer more programs to advance
this goal. As Jeanette Rankin wrote, "Men and women are like
right and left hands; we are more efficient and accomplished when
we use both."
Rosemarie M. Johnson, M.D., is Associate
Clinical Professor, Department of Anesthesiology, University of
California-San Diego, and is an anesthesiologist in private practice
at Scripps Clinic, La Jolla, California.
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