The hierarchy of medicine has been built to accommodate men who for a century have not shared [the same caregiving] burdens. While the sheer number of women in medicine has increased, the hierarchy, and specifically the gender makeup of leadership in medicine, has not changed,” Shillcutt said. “Thus, neither have the work structures or work flexibility.”
Already, women healthcare professionals were questioning whether the industry could support them if it wasn’t offering access to crucial benefits like paid leave and child care or access to flexible schedules and support for continuing education or mentorship. The pandemic has only made that question more urgent.
Only about
25 percent of healthcare workershave access to paid family leave, and surveys of mothers in medicine have found that about
four in five reported facing gender or maternal discrimination at work. A
recent study of women in academic medicine that looked at U.S. medical school graduates from 1979 to to 2018 found that women were 23 percent less likely to be promoted to professor positions and 54 percent less likely to chair departments. It
cited responsibilities with child care and elder care as one of the reasons women were held back from promotions.