Women Surgeons Get Sexually Harassed and Assaulted WHILE Performing Surgery

A snapshot of what life is still often like for too many women

Women surgeons in NHS hospitals are being groped and sexually harassed on a regular basis — sometimes even while they are performing surgeries, a new study done by the University of Exeter reports. I would have been shocked to read this, except that I’d already seen a similar report not that long ago about women surgeons in Australia and New Zealand that reported the exact same thing.

In 2019, the Sydney Morning Herald published a story on the rampant sexual harassment, bullying, and misogyny that female surgeons routinely experienced in Australia and New Zealand. It’s something that female doctors, and surgeons, in particular, experience in many countries.

To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”

Fine, Cordelia. Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (p. 126). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

To make matters worse, this is a problem that is out in the open but that just hasn’t been addressed. The University of Exeter study found 35,000 cases of sexual misconduct in the NHS in the past five years and reported that “90% of women, and 81% of men, had witnessed some form of sexual misconduct.” In other words, it’s everywhere and everybody knows it, but nobody is willing to do anything about it.

One woman who reported that a senior male surgeon had wiped his face on her breasts during surgery was nonetheless astounded when none of her colleagues who witnessed it said anything.

“He wasn’t even the most senior person in the operating theatre, but he knew that behaviour was ok and that’s just rotten,” she said.

The climate of silence and threats of reprisal are what allow for such an outrageous level of problematic behavior to continue. Much of surgical training involves learning from more senior doctors in the operating theater and reporting impropriety could foreseeably impact a woman’s career if she talks about it.

Nearly two-thirds of women surgeons who responded to the researchers said they had been the target of sexual harassment and a third had been sexually assaulted by colleagues in the past five years.

Women say they fear reporting incidents will damage their careers and they lack confidence the NHS will take action. (BBC News)

Naturally, the NHS and other relevant medical entities have expressed dismay at the study results and a desire to make improvements, while also acknowledging that this has been a long-standing issue.

The British Medical Association called the findings “atrocious”. Dr Latifa Patel, BMA equality lead, said: “It is appalling that women in surgery are being subjected to sexual assault and sexual misconduct from their colleagues, at work and often whilst they are trying to care for patients. The impact this will have on their wellbeing for years to come as well as their careers is profound.”

Tim Mitchell, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, told the BBC the survey’s findings are “deeply shocking and will be a source of great embarrassment to the surgical profession”.

He acknowledged it is “clear it is a common problem” that has not been addressed. (BBC News)

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not confined to surgeons, or even to the field of medicine. Women in all sorts of scientific and academic disciplines are often subject to the same kinds of harassment and demands for sexual favors — something that damages morale, but that also often drives women out of these fields. A much smaller number of men are also harassed or assaulted.

“The report concludes that the cumulative result of sexual harassment in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine is significant damage to research integrity and a costly loss of talent in these fields,” concludes another relevant study. (National Academies)

As a story in The Atlantic notes, quid pro quo of sexual favors and regular harassment used to be routine for women in certain academic fields, and although that has improved somewhat, it’s still a problem — one that too often drives women out of science.

Today, this kind of quid pro quo may be less common, but sexual harassment at universities persists. The spate of lawsuits, investigations, and recent resignations at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and UCLA, accompanied by older cases leaked to the press and an increase in women going public about their experiences, have made that clear. Graduate students and postdocs are particularly vulnerable, because their futures depend so completely on good recommendations from professors. And STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students are more dependent than others. Their career progress hinges on invitations to work on professors’ grants or — if students have their own projects — access to big data sets or expensive lab equipment controlled by overwhelmingly male senior faculty. (The Atlantic)

I could write another whole story about pregnancy discrimination alone. Opportunities suddenly “dry up” and dismissive talk about “pregnancy brain” suddenly crop up when women post-docs and researchers announce that they are expecting.

Pregnant undergraduates and graduate students are frequently told that their only option is to withdraw from their programs, with no guarantee of readmission. Withdrawing can mean losing academic progress, tuition, fellowships, on-campus jobs, health insurance, and sometimes housing, according to the university policies we have studied and the people we have spoken with. (The Atlantic)

Honestly, what century are we living in? It’s just ridiculous! Male researchers and students having new babies suffer no negative consequences whatsoever.

And there are people out there who think that equality has arrived, that Western women are really just fine, and that they are largely overreacting about pervasive discrimination and sexual violence in the workplace. These people are completely uninformed or just completely delusional. This story makes that entirely clear.

I said earlier that I wasn’t shocked, but JFC, how could you not be hearing about these realities? Women being groped and harassed in the middle of assisting in operating on patients as a common and routine problem that EVERYBODY knows about but that nobody does anything about… I’m having a hard time not screaming, “What is wrong with you people?”

© Copyright Elle Beau 2023

Edit: I meant to include this study in the main essay, but got derailed by how outrageous it is that women surgeons have to deal with this stuff.

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