Month: December 2022
Challenges for women in surgery
By: Shiona Maria Benedict Fernandes “You will get married soon in the future. How will you be able to manage your family and your work life, if you choose this hectic lifestyle that surgery puts you through?” asked my mother back in 2020 when I had decided to tell her that being a surgeon was my dream. In addition to social deterrents, with women in surgery have also faced sexual harassment. Which has frequently gone unreported and and a well documented pay gap. It has been shown that lack of financial rewards and career advancement opportunities are two of the top challenges for female surgeons. In my opinion, medical schools and programs like AWS should create grants or scholarships for trans woman residents too. As to support their masters or research in surgery to encourage all women to continue their passion in surgery. The data is taken from Women in...
Finding Your Stage Presence
By Kimberly Lumpkins, MD, MBA I have a confession: I love public speaking. Standing on stage and feeling the audience connect with you is a magical experience. People often tell me that they couldn’t possibly be as comfortable on stage as I appear to be--that it must be some sort of innate and alien talent, but nothing could be further from reality. I began as a laughably awful public speaker, who was terrified of the stage. Back in high school, I joined the public speaking team where I was notable only for my abject incompetence. Memorized monotonous reading, check. A blizzard of “um” and “uh” peppered throughout every sentence, check. Gut churning nausea before every speech, check. I mutually parted ways with the team at the end of the year, in search of some other less miserable activity. So how did I progress from public speaking ignominy to finding genuine...