Psychology

PsychologDr. Sibert is to be commended for her commitment to the practice of medicine, and for finding a work-life balance she feels was successful for her and her own family. However, I found the article a vast oversimplification of the issues it highlighted, simultaneously glossing over the difficulties and misplacing focus on an issue that beleaguers not only the modern medical workplace, but our society as a whole.Like Dr. Sibert, I am an anesthesiologist. Also like Dr. Sibert, I have children, and work full-time in a busy and high-acuity private practice. But as a woman in medicine, I find her views sexist, inflammatory, and frankly discouraging, and I can only hope she has not turned a crop of bright, young potential doctors away from the field entirely simply in her assessment that, to be truly worthy, a life of medicine must exist to the exclusion of all else. The face of medicine is changing, and the culture of medicine must change along with it.

The fact is that, on the whole, the media have been very positive about evolutionary psychology, reporting a variety of tentative findings as ground-breaking discoveries and making cultural heroes of some of the most effective defenders of the approach. (…) The problem is that this success was based not so much on an interest for scientific progress and for a genuinely naturalistic understanding of human affairs, as on a taste for sweeping generalizations with hints of political and moral relevance, in particular about sexual relationships, violence, domination, and so on. The reputation of evolutionary psychology has greatly gained from this press coverage, with more students attracted, more jobs, and more research funding, but there is a price to benefitting from the kind of distorted and simplified image produced by the media.

Dr. Sibert's own article states that while almost half of medical school graduates last year were women, men still make up 70% of the doctors in this country, a historical holdover from a time where virtually all doctors were men. These days, more and more women are entering medical school--bright, hardworking, sensitive students who entered medicine to help people and do good. Should these doctors be held to a different standard than their male counterparts, as Dr. Sibert suggests? Should women who choose to have children be thought of as less committed, less worthy of the honor of a medical education, or as a drain on the system? It's a slippery slope when you start penalizing people for the desire or potential to reproduce, and from there it's a short step to discouraging women from becoming doctors at all.

Psychology