Pesky women
Women must not have jobs, because they have to have babies so what are we all supposed to do while they have those babies???
A prominent retired surgeon has claimed too many women are doing medical degrees, which is causing problems for the NHS as “women have got to have babies” and many end up working part-time.
Dr Meirion Thomas, a former professor of surgical oncology at Imperial College, said the gender balance has swung too far in favour of female medical students.
Asked what was wrong with having more female doctors in training, Dr Thomas told Times Radio “the fact of life is that women have got to have babies”.
Ok, so then they take leave and someone else fills their positions.
Dr Thomas said women often end up working part-time or job-sharing, which he claimed was impacting NHS services.
No, see, because then what you do is you hire people to fill those gaps. If the women are working part-time then they’re getting a part-time salary, so the NHS can hire people to fill up the bottle.
Pressed on why that would be a problem, Dr Thomas said: “The one problem is that medical schools now are taking 60 to 70 per cent women as medical students. It’s a huge imbalance, huge imbalance and that should be reduced to 50-50 for sure.”
But when there’s a huge imbalance in which men are the majority that’s fine, amiright?
Halfway through, I scrolled back up, saying to myself, that did say “retired,” didn’t. Ah, yes, “retired.”
Those female medical students better get off his lawn or else.
A couple of years ago, I read an article saying that there were too few men going into OB/GYN now. They even quoted one female student as saying “we need the male perspective”.
Seriously? For centuries, males pronounced on female health without the female perspective. They got a lot of things wrong, because their assumptions were incorrect, based more on their assumption of women as inferior men, rather than actual observation and experiment.
That is one perspective we DON”T need.
And women don’t have to have babies. I’ve known a number of women who were quite happy without them.
@ iknklast #2
It’s perhaps another instance of misogyny; that is, it’s the ghettoization of a specialty about women, leaving it only to women.
Actually, maddog, I think in this case it’s responding to the needs of women. For too long, we had no option but male doctors for our most intimate needs. Now we have women, and the screaming starts. Men need to be in this field! Men need to be looking into women’s privates! We need men! Because they are not dominating…
I have never seen anyone suggesting we need more women urologists. Double standard much?
There has been a murderous dimension to the classic ‘battle of the sexes.’ In Mediaeval times, traditional females-only midwifery from centuries before got into a long brawl with the rising (males only) medical profession, and the midwives got put on trial, and burned at the stake in many cases, for being in league with Satan. (Guilty until proven innocent.)
The medicos emerged as the winners, controlling both entry to the profession (ie numbers allowed to practice) and the fees charged for their services. The modern market fundamentalist Milton Friedman (Free to Chose) referred to this arrangement as ‘The dodctors’ racket.’
In my 1960s) student years at Sydney University, I remember being told by med students that the competition was so fierce to make it into the quota that allowed one to progress from one level up to the next, that students would hide library books from one another, and if asked for help on some topic by a fellow student, would deliberately feed them bullshit. It was dog-eat-dog.
https://www.everand.com/audiobook/693699449/Witchcraft-A-History-in-Thirteen-Trials
I don’t have a problem with men becoming OBGYNs, but what is their uniquely valuable perspective supposed to be? That condition isn’t important enough to worry about? I could put an extra stitch in that tear to tighten things up for hubby? Nice looking vulva? Not qualifying in my view. And yes, I’ve known female friends who have experienced each of those comments.
I was at a med school graduation in Canada last year, and I’d say the class was about 70% female. I was at a vet school graduation in the UK the year before, and that was about 80% female. These are both traditionally male professions in which women have been the majority of graduates for the last two decades at least. Women are more serious about entering these professions and do the work required. Men don’t then whine about how unfair it is.
But if the retired doctor is right that women MDs end up working part-time and sharing jobs, maybe the disparity in graduation rates is a good thing for balance in the profession.
We need men to tell women that the speculum exam has to be done, so just bear the cold metal, okay?
@Sumi: Just two decades? I graduated forty years ago alongside a medical cohort that was 80% female! Including the former veterinary student who, we were all relieved to learn, took an extra conversion course in human anatomy.