Take Their Place–or Take YOUR Place?

Here’s a little vignette from higher education: In the surgical theater of one of the teaching hospitals at Harvard medical school, several portraits of prominent physicians will be removed from their current grouping and placed elsewhere. The decision is more political (for lack of a better word) than aesthetic.  The docs are white and male, and all that massed masculine whiteness is intimidating to women.  Not that any female residents have complained; it seems to be an ideological decision.

The men so honored are described as pioneers of medicine, going back to the days when the profession was all but exclusively male.  There were reasons for that, besides discrimination.  Discrimination certainly existed–most of these men were only a generation removed from a time when women were considered less rational, intelligent, stable, and hardy than men.  But practically speaking, only a hundred years ago it would have been hard to be married (as most women were) and a full-time physician.  It would have been impossible to bear and raise children (as most women did) and work as a full-time physician.  One requirement of pioneering is being first to show up for it.

Now many more women are involved in medicine because they can be.  They can even be pioneers.  The way to encourage them is not to remove the old pioneers from places they earned, but to encourage new ones to take their own places.  There’s more than one way to look at an assembly of faces that seem to be too much of one color or sex.  You can see those white-coated authority figures, however pleasant they appear, as old curmudgeons keeping you down–even if many of them are currently six feet under.  Or you can see them as leading the way.  For you.  The former is solipsistic and limiting: history really isn’t about you, sister.  The latter is inspirational and challenging–you go, girl!  That surgical procedure developed by Dr. X, that tool designed by Dr. Y, sets you up for taking the next step forward.

The main hallway of my local hospital is lined with photos of the resident physicians.  Most of them are white and male, but more and more women are taking their places among them.  That will continue, and the pioneering business will continue as well–but not by stomping old pioneers out of memory.