I can’t bring myself to watch my residency graduation video.
Prior to my final year of residency, I was voted to become a Chief Resident for our residency program. It felt like an honor and it’s a line on my CV, but otherwise, it was approximately 16 months of unpaid secretarial labor.
Even before the year started, there was the > 100 hours of creating a complex schedule involving residents from four different institutions rotating at five different sites. In addition to managing schedule changes and listening to squabbles among the residents, there also was quite a bit of emotional “dirty work.” For example, there were multiple occasions when an attending asked me to give negative feedback to one their residents, since it would be easier to have me deliver the bad news than for them to sit down and have an awkward conversation. There were other times that I was tasked with using my own social capital in order to harass my fellow residents into making scheduling switches that they did not want. While some of these schedule switches were necessary due to unavoidable circumstances, this resulted in me having to beg and plead for people to do favors for me, even though, without fail, these changes never actually helped my own schedule at all.
Overall, it was exhausting. I started avoiding social events, for fear of hearing any more complaints.
Throughout the year, though, I had a nagging feeling that a bit more of this emotional work fell upon my shoulders because I was a woman. It wasn’t anything I could ever prove. But there were times that another resident would approach me to help plan their own social event. When I asked why I was being requested to organize someone else’s event, the response was invariably some form of “Well, you’re just so GOOD at this.” Essentially, I was so good at making lists and badgering people to show up to required events, that I should help the greater good with my “talents.”
This felt akin to telling me “Wow, you’re so good at cleaning bathrooms; since you’re so good at it, you should come over and clean mine, too.” There seemed to be a lack of understanding that everyone should be cleaning up after themselves; asking me to do it for other people only served to imply that I more useful as a secretary than as a physician. Part of me truly wondered if because I was a mom at home, I was simply expected to be everyone’s mother at work, too.
But there was one final event that removed any doubt from my mind that my gender played a role in my treatment as Chief Resident: this was the speech that our very much beloved program director gave for me at our residency graduation.
As I stood in front of the large room of my co-residents and faculty of our entire department, my program director started one of his classic, passionate speeches. It soon became clear, though, that he was not going to speak about my publication record, clinical skills, or rapport with patients.
His speech centered around an extended comparison between myself and his secretary, in which she and I were both touted as “frighteningly organized.” He described how she and I could communicate “without using nouns or verbs.” This was supposed to be my shining moment in front of the entire department, but instead, I was mortified. My work as a secretary had made more of an impact than my work as a resident.
I recognize that any Chief Resident in a program with a complex schedule, male or female, will have to deal with heaps of scheduling labor. But, something tells me that a male Chief Resident would not be lauded only for organizational skills and cheerily compared to the program director’s secretary.
One important lesson did come out of this experience: should I ever be asked to take on a labor-intensive, organizational role again, I will speak up and demand to be appropriately compensated. Sure, I can type fast and create a schedule out of thin air for 80 people, involving 730 overnight calls and 358 back up calls. But Defiant Bitch, MD, won’t ever be doing that again for free!
Defiant Bitch, MD