International Women’s Day is celebrated yearly on March 8. I always congratulate all my female family and friends. As I was getting ready to write the post for this week, I realized I didn’t know much of the history behind it.
Before getting into this year’s theme which is shedding the spotlight on biases that fuel gender inequality, I want to talk about the history.
The first National Women’s Day was in 1909 and it was declared by the Socialist Part of America. At that time, it was celebrated on the last Sunday of February until 1913. An International Women’s Day was proposed in 1910, during the second International Conference of Working Women. It was celebrated in 11 European countries on March 19, 1911. March 8 is the fixed date of International Women’s Day since 1914, when the date was moved to match Russian women, who celebrated the day on February 23 on the Gregorian calendar. It is a date meant to celebrate the “global social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women” according to the International Women’s Day website.
As I mentioned earlier, the theme this year is “gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow.” If you are looking for events to celebrate, check out the United Nations website. The UN is holding a virtual day of observance with many great speakers. Check out the website at www.unwomen.org.
Since I am a doctor, talking about gender inequality in medicine. This is a little different than the theme of combining gender disparities and climate change but I think it is important to talk about it. A quick search of the literature yields close to 600,000 articles about the topic. Many have been published in the last 5 years.
Women physicians are routinely paid less for the same work and responsibilities. They are have fewer leadership roles in organized medicine as well as academia. Women are often passed over for tenure at major academic institutions. Studies have identified stereotyped gender phrases being used in evaluation of faculty. These tends to adversely affect women. Evaluation are used as part of the promotion process, which of course, ties in to salary and ranking. The list goes on and on. I will cite some of the studies at the bottom of this post for those interested in more specifics.
So what can we do? I like to focus my blog posts on coming up with solutions to the problems. The steps below apply to all women, not just those in medicine.
# 1 – Acknowledge the problem and learn about it
#2 – Fund women organizations that are working on step #1 but also moving things forward
#3 – Vote for political candidates that have diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of their track record
#4 – Support women leaders in all areas
# 5 – Get involved! Join a group, become a leader, write a blog post!
I cannot end a blog post this week without talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The devastating events that are unfolding in the region will no doubt have long lasting consequences. I know many of us feel powerless and frustrated that we can’t do more to help. If you are able to contribute in any way, please do. Here are some organizations you can donate to:
Razom for Ukraine
Nova Ukraine
snyder.substack.com – How to help Ukrainians now (page with many different links)
World Central Kitchen
Please feel free to post any more ideas in the comments.
Instead of wishing everyone a happy International Women’s Day, I want to wish us all strength and inspiration to keep doing the work, so that one day, we won’t need to have a special day
References
Spector ND, Overholser B. Examining Gender Disparity in Medicine and Setting a Course Forward. JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(6):e196484.
Weng JK, Valle LF, Nam GE, Chu F-I, Steinberg ML, Raldow AC. Evaluation of sex distribution of industry payments among radiation oncologists. JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(1):e187377.
Heath JK, Weissman GE, Clancy CB, Shou H, Farrar JT, Dine CJ. Assessment of gender-based linguistic differences in physician trainee evaluations of faculty using automated text mining. JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(5):e193520.