Under the slogan “Equality for women: progress for all” today is celebrated the International Working Women’s Day. A date to review the achievements and challenges. We have done so with some of the doctors of Top Doctors.
“The effectiveness of the scalpel does not depend on the force with which it is used” is one of the reflections of Dr. Elisabeth Vincent Hamelin when we asked her about equality between men and women in medicine. Dr. Vincent introduced laparoscopic surgery in Spain and did not stop until it was implemented in a University Hospital, for her “in the field of medicine, a woman must fight just to achieve objectives, above any discrimination”.
Dr. Natalia Ribé is only concerned with demonstrating her professionalism to her patients, “current and future patients who want and value my ethics and professionalism and are willing to put themselves in my hands”, she runs her own aesthetic medicine center, a specialty in which women dominate. She agrees with other colleagues that “few female doctors reach the head positions in a hospital or the professorship in a university”.
Dr. Aurora Guerra is one. She teaches as Professor of Dermatology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Complutense University of Madrid and is also Head of the Dermatology Section at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre. She is more blunt: “we may be considered good doctors, but we are not valued in many aspects of healthcare”. Nor for the sick “they are increasingly less able to distinguish between male and female doctors, but differences still persist and it really hurts”.
Women’s values
There are exceptions. Dr. María Teresa Iradier, Military Merit Cross, recalls with emotion the words of affection of a patient who recovered his sight after surgery: “Dr. Iradier you have done more for me than anyone else in my whole life.” For her, equality in the profession has been a reality for many years. Advances have helped make it so. “Before it was a handicap for women professionals because it required a lot of strength in specialties such as traumatology or cardiac surgery, surgical instruments have changed and have become more accessible to women,” says Dr. Paloma Pulido, a prestigious neurosurgeon with more than twenty years of experience, who says she has never noticed a different treatment because she is a woman. “Fortunately, these differences are less and less perceived,” says Dr. Àngels Bayés, Director of the Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Unit at the Teknon Medical Center in Barcelona. “Feminine values work in this profession. In the face of health, the capacity for teamwork, delicacy, left-handedness and know-how are paramount.”