#All my patients are women professional#

“I realised it’s not just a medical HR problem, it goes deeper than that. “If it was affecting the way I consider my colleagues, could it be affecting other things – for instance, could it be affecting the care I give my patients? “I started to think about unconscious bias,” continues Dr Hillman. Unconscious bias is rife in society – not just the medical profession – and it occurs when we use our instinct over objective analysis to make a snap decision. However, there is some way to go and the pipeline shows that we lose many talented women on the way.” Women now make up the majority of doctors in training, and even in traditionally male-orientated specialities such as surgery the proportion of women in training is on the rise. “Thankfully the proportion of women represented in the medical profession has changed rapidly since then. “These women were known as the Edinburgh Seven and they went on to achieve everything that was expected of them, and more, but they were never allowed to graduate” And at one point, they were obstructed by hundreds of people from entering an anatomy exam. They were instructed to find their own lecturers. They were charged more to attend then the men. “It was just 150 years ago that the first seven women enrolled onto a UK medical degree.

#All my patients are women professional#

I had an unconscious gender bias when it came to thinking about what a senior medical professional looked like. “I knew of this professor and it was with embarrassment that I realised that I had also made the assumption that they were a man. “A colleague told me she had attended a conference where the keynote speaker – a well-respected professor – appeared on stage and there were audible whispers and comments when people realised, with surprise, that this professor was a woman,” she explains. These days, nobody would consider that a woman could not reach the highest tier of medicine, but Dr Hillman describes the moment she discovered her own unconscious gender bias.

I now proudly call myself a medical feminist and all I am asking is for women to be treated the same as men.” However, as my experience grew, so did my realisation. “So, naively, I had never really considered that gender bias existed in medicine. “I never questioned my ability or eligibility to go to medical school,” she explains. Sarah Hillman graduated from medical school in 2004. This is not equality says Dr Sarah Hillman, Academic Clinical Fellow at Warwick Medical School and GP registrar, who wants to see changes in the way that medicine considers women. Everything, throughout the history of medicine, from the profession’s origins, to the way drugs are tested and the diagnosis of medical conditions, works on a model where the male body is the default and the female body is ‘the other’.