Re: Quo Vadis Gender Politics in FP?

Dr. Hutten-Czapski questions whether efforts to empower female physicians are as important today as they would have been a few decades back, now that there are more women entering family medicine than men. In our view, ensuring gender equity is every bit as important today as ever before. This has been affirmed by numerous international bodies, including Wonca, the international face of family medicine.

There are significant structural impediments which continue to discourage and restrict women’s full participation in civil society in both Canada and everywhere else. In addition, Canadian and international research continues to confirm that this discrimination interferes with how well women physicians can and do provide health care in their communities. The CFPC gender equity initiatives that we outline in our paper are key to our remedying these imbalances in family medicine in Canada.

It is no coincidence that senior women physicians like us (who have all experienced, withstood and overcome many of these impediments) are advocating for the “redressing of identified imbalance”. We still experience marginalization and even retribution by virtue of our gender, but are perhaps more seasoned and less vulnerable than junior women faculty to the subtle and less-than-subtle disparagement that occurs when women tackle gender issues. Our advocacy raises no moral (or any other conflict) between equality and equity. To assert that members of a disadvantaged group have a “conflict of interest” in advocating the elimination of inequities, because that group and thus they themselves might therefore benefit, is specious. It is far truer that gender equity is threatening to individual male physicians because to this day, the status quo represents enhanced opportunities for male physicians’ advancement especially at leadership levels. The elimination of gender inequities will not only “level the playing field” for men and women physicians; it will enhance the profession as a whole.