Women surgeons

It's a cottage industry. Seeking out victims. Women outnumber men in medical school, law school, pharmacy and veterinary medicine. 40% of U.S. physicians are women (not sure those sexist stats are going to be collected indefinitely). 80% of veterinary students are women. But it's never enough. Today I got an e-mail from OSU about the 4th annual Women in Surgery Symposium and the focus? You guessed it. Workplace inequalities, bullying and microaggressions. This constant agitation by mushrooming "education" agenda driven non-profits is so lucrative, it will never go away. Maybe you'd better interview your surgeon before submitting to the knife. Make sure she isn't angry or stressed.

Sneak peek at “A republic, if you can keep it”

It's a wonderful day to sit on the deck with a cuppa and enjoy the blue sky and rustling leaves with a good book. But because it's so lovely, the lawn crew has shown up and there's a very loud mower just a few yards away, so I'm back inside. Even after 18 years here in this delightful spot with mature trees and a creek, I'm still thrilled to have them doing it and not Bob.

I'm loving "A republic, if you can keep it," by Neil Gorsuch. In the introduction he introduces us to his roots and branches, some fascinating people. All of us should have to write a paragraph or two about parents, grandparents, great uncles, etc. and their challenges and contributions so we understand how we got here.

Of his mother (pgs 13-14): "My mother was brilliant and a feminist before feminism. Born in Casper, Wyoming, she graduated from the University of Colorado at 19 and its law school at 22. That was a time when almost no women went to law school. She studied and taught in India as a Fulbright Scholar and went to work as the first female lawyer in the Denver District Attorney's Office. There, she helped start a program to pursue deadbeat dads who had failed to pay child support, long before efforts like that were routine. Her idea of daycare often meant me [Neil] tagging along. She never stopped moving. When she ran for the Colorado state legislature, where she was soon voted the outstanding freshman legislator, she wore out countless pairs of shoes walking the entire district again and again. As kids, we just had to keep up. Later, she served as the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington."

With a mother like that, how could he be anything other than a great lawyer and judge.

That pesky male female gap

The Pew Research Center found that 2019 will be the first year in which women will comprise the majority of the college-educated labor force in the United States. Women first received more than half of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the 1981-82 academic year—almost 40 years ago.  Today they earn about 57% of bachelor’s degrees. The number of college-educated women in the adult population (ages 25 and older) surpassed the number of college-educated men in 2007. Does anyone fret about that imbalance created by loans, scholarships, affirmative action and unfair regulations?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/20/u-s-women-near-milestone-in-the-college-educated-labor-force/ft_19-06-20_womenlaborforce_women-now-half-of-us-college-educated-labor-force-2/

So why are we still hearing about the “gap,” especially since for about 4 decades the college enrollment rate for females has exceeded males and for the younger demographic there is no gap given the same starting place and position? 

There’s a lot of mischief in gap statistics.  Especially college degrees.  Women, even in the same fields as men, may select different specialties—pediatrics instead of neuroscience, family law instead of corporate law, bibliographer instead of library director, or they may want to be an artist instead of a plumber or electrician. Women may decide to raise their own children and “stop-out” for 5-10 years, reentering the labor market with reduced value to employers.  Married women with husbands of equal education and financial status often have the luxury to leave the medical or law fields to start a business in a completely different direction such as interior design or selling craft items. 

Unfortunately, these “justice” studies rarely compare women with women—female doctors with female pre-school directors, or female TV hosts with female owners of bed and breakfasts, or female chefs with female dishwashers, female traffic court judges with female circuit court judges. Why not compare single women who are heads of household with married women who have no children?  In the universe of women employees there are gaps with men, but there are overlaps also, with low end of the bell curve  the men who clean the offices of  wealthy women politicians like Pelosi and Warren who are sitting at the high end of the bell curve.

What is concerning to me is that college educated women increasingly vote for Democrats, seeing themselves still as needing additional help from the government to manage their lives.

Doubt--cancelled CBS series

We were in Columbus briefly for an artist event, so while unwinding at home I clicked on the TV by habit, and began to watch a CBS show called “Doubt.” Yes, a lawyer show. How original. About 15 minutes into it I realized that although the screen promo said, “New” this had a story line that goes back a bit. So I got on the computer and read that it was cancelled after two winter shows in 2017, but there were a number in the can, and what we were watching on August 12 were the last two episodes. Cliff hanger of course, and now we’ll never know . Did the pediatrician really kill his girl friend 24 years ago and his blood didn’t show it because he’d had a bone marrow transplant for leukemia years after the murder?

I recognized Katherine Heigl the lead who was obviously pregnant and all angles tried to hide it, Elliot Gould (former husband of Barbra Streisand who used to be a good actor but now seems way over the hill and not given anything important to say) and Judith Light (One life to live, Who’s the boss, and who looked 10 years older than her real age of 68). But the big “breakthrough” of this thankfully short series was a transwoman (Laverne Cox) in a a leading role in a love affair with a cis male (a person assigned male biology at birth). I think it means two gay guys who just don’t want to admit who they really are. We were treated to lots of smooching by these two, as well as two women expecting a baby and one has been busted for drugs and will miss her wife's ultrasound just to desensitize and assure us that all this is normal.

I don’t think it was pulled because of any concern about the transwoman (didn’t fool me--he still has a man’s voice and way too much make-up), or the white and Asian women expecting a baby--that ship has sailed, or because the hot shot lawyer falls in love with her client who may or may not be guilty of murder. It apparently just didn’t have the numbers after the first 2 episodes. Although the summer showings were stronger than the winter, that was probably because there wasn’t much else to do on a Saturday night in August in Columbus, Ohio.

Why are minority women leaving the big law firms?

I don't think this is a problem just  for minority women (the only articles that will sell), or just law, but women in general. When we get away from education, or nursing, or business related fields, we complain, feel insecure, anxious, and put upon. And good golly Miss Molly, it's been 40 years! I've noticed that women in the formerly male-only professions (in my youth) retire quite early and try something else, or leave to raise families, try art, or write a novel. Librarians, teachers, nurses, buyers, accountants--they seem to stick it out. Back when I was employed in the 1990s, I knew a woman lawyer who had become a librarian, and a woman veterinarian who had become a librarian.  I know a woman doctor who quit in her 50s to write novels, and another who quit in her 50s because she hated the government interference in her profession. Am I meeting the wrong women? We females by-passed men in college enrollment for the last 2 decades, yet still picking the soft degrees and complaining about salaries. When we pick the tough fields, we drop out?

 http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/minority_women_are_disappearing_from_biglaw_and_heres_why/

Eighty-five percent of minority female attorneys in the U.S. will quit large firms within seven years of starting their practice. According to the research and personal stories these women share, it’s not because they want to leave, or because they “can’t cut it.” It’s because they feel they have no choice.

“When you find ways to exclude and make people feel invisible in their environment, it’s hostile,” Jones says. “Women face these silent hostilities in ways that men will never have to. It’s very silent, very subtle and you, as a woman of color—people will say you’re too sensitive. So you learn not to say anything because you know that could be a complete career killer. You make it as well as you can until you decide to leave.”

I wonder how black women "know" what hostilities the men in their firm have faced?