Re: Does working part-time mean I’ve failed as a feminist? (1)

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 65, No. 10, December 2023, Page 367 Letters
By: Rita K. McCracken, MD, PhD, CCFP (COE), FCFP

Thank you, Dr Dunne, for sharing your experience as a feminist who is also a physician, managing your time in the modern world [BCMJ 2023;65:277]. Your experience is shared by many, many others. There is still a real, measurable gender gap in opportunities. And, if the medical profession wants to address that, we need to make systemic change, not place the burden on individuals to decide if they can act like they have it all.

It is time for our professional physician organizations to stop observing the differences[1-3] and instead make real change to remove the burden of sexism from individuals and replace the structures that created it in the first place.

I admire Anne-Marie Slaughter’s work, but I wonder if Audre Lorde’s wise words might not be the better source for women to draw on at this time: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Let’s ask more of our profession and our peers to help solve these problems!
—Rita McCracken, MD, PhD, CCFP (COE), FCFP
Vancouver

This letter was submitted in response to “Does working part-time mean I’ve failed as a feminist?”

hidden

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

References

1.    Cohen M, Kiran T. Closing the gender pay gap in Canadian medicine. CMAJ 2020;192:E1011-E1017.

2.    Steffler M, Chami N, Hill S, et al. Disparities in physician compensation by gender in Ontario, Canada. JAMA Netw Open 2021;4:e2126107.

3.    Canadian Medical Association. Equity and diversity in medicine. 20 March 2023. Accessed 23 October 2023. www.cma.ca/physician-wellness-hub/content/equity-and-diversity-medicine.

Rita K. McCracken, MD, PhD, CCFP (COE), FCFP. Re: Does working part-time mean I’ve failed as a feminist? (1). BCMJ, Vol. 65, No. 10, December, 2023, Page(s) 367 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply