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Cali's Work+Life "Fit" Blog

Is the Problem Women Doctors, or the Way Doctors Work?

(Click here to check out this week’s Fast Company post “Work+Life Flex as Retention-Retirement Strategy? Yes, Say More Retirees and Companies“)

A British medical journal, a Canadian magazine and the medical blogosphere have ignited a controversial debate around the following premise:

There are too many women doctors who want to work part-time, which is contributing to a lack of capacity in the medical system. Therefore, we should reconsider the amount of resources devoted to the education of women doctors and focus more of them on men.

This debate was the subject of a interesting post a couple of weeks ago, “Women Doctors: Waste of Money?” in BusinessWeek’s Working Parents blog. Not surprisingly it resulted in many emotional comments on both sides of the issue.

I asked a 40-something, male doctor I know to weigh in, and he brought up an another angle: “Certainly my anecdotal experience is that more women work part time and those that work full time take more time off for family reasons. But, many MEN entering medicine are not willing to work the way men did 30 years ago. And this is commonly called a “poor work ethic.”

This got me thinking. Is the problem simply about more women than men wanting to work a reduced schedule? Or is it also about doctors resisting fundamentally rethinking some of the ways they do their jobs so there is more work+life flexibility for everyone, not just women?

I recently met a doctor who had tried to innovate the way medicine was practiced in his specialty to give people more work+life flexibility and failed.