Your Stories

I am coming to the end of my F1 year, and even in my short career so far I have noticed the massive gender gap. In my surgical placement we had the opportunity to attend theatre, and it quickly became apparent that the male doctors were offered this far more frequently than the women. Senior staff often assumed that we were not interested in surgery and we were not offered the same opportunities or taken as seriously if we felt a patient was unwell.

There was one shift where I was on a ward round with a male consultant, registrar and physicians associate (PA). Each time the consultant would tell his plans to the PA despite the fact that I was holding the patients notes to document them. They also frequently would speak whilst turned away and so I couldn’t hear what the plans were. The PA was also frequently condescending, assuming I didn’t know how to do simple things such as request appropriate blood tests or fill out OGD request forms.

I made a complaint about a registrar (who already had a bad reputation) after I witnessed him being particularly unsafe with a patient. Following this, he started to purposefully call me by the wrong name every time he saw me. There was also a locum SHO who on one occasion screamed at two nurses who asked him to clarify his clinical assessment (he claimed a patient had a NEWS of 2, but when they repeated the obs a minute later they actually had a NEWS of 10 and looked very unwell). When another male doctor came to see what was happening he was really pleasant, saying that he is a nice guy but ‘can become dangerous if he’s angry’.

When I moved round to my acute medical block it quickly became apparent that there was one consultant who was notoriously difficult to work with. He was rude, demanding, impatient and generally bad-tempered. He was particularly foul to female juniors, often critical of the smallest mistakes and frequently not trusting what he was told. He didn’t bother to learn the names of female staff, and if a female doctor was down in ED he would frequently comment that they ‘shouldn’t bother coming back’ to the ward.

He frequently would praise male members of staff for work carried out by female peers or superiors. He also would often only select male members of staff to go with him on ward rounds, and pulled two of them away from taks they were in the middle of despite me offering that I was free to go with him. During one board round he asked me to pass him a set of notes, and then when I held them out to him he said ‘well what does it say then’. During the same board round he aggressively argued with a cardiology ST7 about a patient who she had assessed with a cardiology problem, and would talk over the top of her while she tried to offer her specialist opinion.

Overall there are some lovely people within the trust and most of the time the good outweighs the bad. However, at times it has been too much. There was a point where, after spending multiple shifts with these consultants in one week and having bad experience after bad experience, I started getting daily panic attacks. The thought of having to go back to work and face these members of staff were making me physically ill. Thankfully the worst of this has passed now but I still often feel uncomfortable around these members of staff – something that shouldn’t still happen in a place of work.

I started an operation on a patient when the consultant who was supposed to be supervising me suddenly aggressively started making innuendo comments. He had been making strange comments since I’d started working there and his colleagues would laugh about how he had this ‘funny’ hate / fear of women, even though he was married. I tried to ignore it and focus on training as a surgeon. One day he turned on me and started kissing me on the mouth and touching my thigh. I was horrified but realised I hadn’t noticed as he was talking he had taken me to an office where there was nobody else around. I didn’t expect him to do that and just froze. I couldn’t react and couldn’t stop him. I didn’t tell anyone for months. Eventually I reported him to the GMC who said he was entitled to behave like that because I was an adult and not a patient. I stayed in my specialty but years later cannot trust anyone and still have nightmares. My colleagues mostly find it tedious to hear about this, either their eyes glaze over or they get angry because they believe it’s all fine and I shouldn’t be unhappy.

We had gone for coffee after the ward round: a male consultant, a male reg, a female junior doctor, and a female nurse. The male reg spent the entire 15 mins talking about how much money can be made from convincing beautiful women they aren’t quite perfect and that they need vulval surgery/varicose vein surgery/breast surgery, etc. He described how his previous juniors were ‘like supermodels’ but despite their looks came to him all the time looking for cosmetic surgery. He then went on to say that pelvic pain is a great speciality for money making as it is so underfunded in the NHS and that he really admired the men who have set up private clinics as women get so desperate they will pay anything.

The male consultant laughed along the entire time and neither seemed to notice how uncomfortable the two female junior members of the team were.

At medical school socials, younger students are often taken advantage of by older students and by junior doctors. Inevitably it’s the youngest, drunkest girl in the room. One doctor admitted that the reason he still attends university socials is because “it’s easy to have sex”.

My supervisor would take any chance he could to touch me and always in full view of the rest of the team. Initially he would place his hands on my arms and back. But this escalated to his hands on my thigh during a teaching in front of all the other consultants. He once grabbed me by my neck and pulled me back when I went in the wrong direction during the ward round. I started to place myself across the room from him and tried to keep quiet to avoid attracting his attention, but he gravitated towards me anyway. I even lied about being engaged, so that he would leave me alone.

I sought advice from several colleagues and nobody was surprised. Everyone had seen what was happening. They said that I was his type and this was far from the first time this had happened.

When I eventually filed a complaint I was met with comments including “he’s taken quite a liking to you” and “Did you tell him not to? I would never let anyone touch me like that at work”.

At the trust I was in, almost all the female FY1s had experiences like this from all levels of male colleagues, but escalating it was an exhausting and unsatisfactory process so people chose to keep quiet. Some were afraid that that saying anything would negatively impact their careers. One was even told that the consultants were untouchable and escalating the matter wouldn’t change anything.

Being a doctor is hard enough without constantly having to think about how to avoid men’s sexual advances. I hope that this culture changes and that we are able to feel safe and respected in our work environment in the future.

A patient threatened to rape me. My (male) manager laughed and said “well what do we expect, bringing a beautiful woman on the ward?”.

I work as a senior pharmacist in a mental health hospital and have so many stories. Consultant psychiatrist who I just met told me I had ‘arresting eyes’, a worker in the Trust MHA (mental health act) office who kept messaging me on Facebook asking me out, telling me I’m his queen despite the fact he had a wife and child on the way. Another who always commented on my lips and how good they looked. (I like wearing bright lipsticks). An IT worker who told me I was very tasty from behind as I was bending down and then proceeded to sexually harass me for months (he was at least 30 years older than me), staring, touching me, constantly hanging around. I complained to my manager who had a quiet word. Didn’t stop him at all. I just gave up in the end. Everyone in the department thought it was funny. He left eventually and then emailed me asking me to meet him.