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?” [10]

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License [11].

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 [12].