Female Doctors Fight ‘Gauze Ceiling’

Many professional women look up the career ladder and see a glass ceiling. For a group of women physicians in Dade County, Fla., that metaphoric barrier is made of gauze.

“It’s hard to cut through gauze,” says Diana Galindo, director of the geriatrics evaluation management program at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Miami. “It’s hard to see beyond the gauze. It’s not like clear glass where you can see where to go.”

To clear the path ahead, Galindo and several other Dade female doctors formed Gauze Ceiling this spring, a support group to address gender issues in medicine and serve as a network for local female physicians.

The group, which adopted its name from a speech at an American Medical Women’s Association meeting last year, was prompted by a dearth of female doctors in the Dade County Medical Association.

Last fall, the Dade association’s leadership realized that although the number of female physicians in the county was growing, few women were joining the organization. To acquaint themselves with the issues that affect this community of female physicians, the association’s leadership asked hematologist-oncologist R. Judith Ratzan, the organization’s only woman executive board member, to help bring female physicians together.

By reaching out to female physicians through Gauze Ceiling, the Dade County Medical Association hopes to identify ways to attract more women. “We want to talk to women physicians about their special needs, issues like child care and networking,” says Paul Gluck, association president.

“What you start thinking is, are we meeting the needs of women?” Ratzan asks. “There aren’t that many women on the board, and the question is: Are their problems different?”

About 50 people attended the group’s first meeting in May, a luncheon at which American Medical Women’s Association President Jean Fourcroy discussed the portrayal of female physicians and their patients in the media. In September, the group hopes to attract about 300 women, Ratzan says.

“The whole purpose is, first of all, so that we can find out about each other,” says Linda Sternau, a neurosurgeon and Gauze Ceiling founding member. “When women are working in an isolated department, with one or two other women out of 20 physicians, they might not even be friends, they may see each other as competition. Once you realize there’s a critical mass, you then can start addressing issues that affect women as physicians - such as parental leave issues, salary issues - and you can help each other.”

Changing demographics underscored the need for the group. More women are entering the medical field, and the percentage of women doctors will continue to grow.

But despite their increasing numbers, female doctors still have not achieved complete parity, Gauze Ceiling founders agree. Women physicians still make less on average than their male counterparts - $124,900 annually compared to $200,900, as of 1993.

Part of the problem may also be that male physicians do not find it as easy to mentor women as they do men, the VA’s Galindo adds.

“Because most of the attending physicians and teachers are men, it can be easier for them to connect with younger male doctors,” Galindo says. “Women aren’t as interested in sports, in playing baseball at the end of the week. In all honesty, they probably don’t know how to deal with us, so that prevents them from being good mentors.”

Like their counterparts in other professions, many female physicians struggle to balance career and family. Compounding this tension further, female doctors have a reputation for spending more time with patients.

“Often we’re given more complex patients to manage, where we’re expected to handle social and psychological problems as well,” Sternau says.

When Sternau and other Gauze Ceiling founders first entered medicine, they faced more overt sexism. At one point, Sternau recalls, she was the only woman in the country doing aneurysm work. Some of her colleagues tried to dissuade her from continuing to perform the difficult procedure. Such experiences may seem foreign to female medical students today, but when these women graduate, they may find themselves in a less egalitarian medical community.

“These young women are going to come out into the existing community where it’s not going to be like it was in medical school,” Ratzan says. “The question is whether there are things that we can do to help them.”