The April 3 edition of The New Yorker magazine had a memorable cover- a beautiful illustration of four women surgeons looking down at a patient lying on an operating table.
The image inspired Dr Susan Pitt, an endocrine surgeon at the Wisconsin University to replicate the image with three other women surgeons. The doctor then tweeted the image. The hashtag was #ILookLikeASurgeon. She challenged other women surgeons to do the same.
#NYerORCoverChallenge #ILookLikeASurgeon Where’s your @NewYorker cover??? Step up! @WomenSurgeons @womeninsurgery pic.twitter.com/DzazM103XG
— Susan Pitt (@susieQP8) April 6, 2017
Female surgeons from countries as diverse as Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mexico and India have responded with their own recreations of the mag cover. The challenge has since become a Twitter trend as the #NYerORCoverChallenge.
UM Vascular surgery women!#ilooklikeasurgeon #NYerORCoverChallenge #UMichSurgery@LoupesLoveMD @AnnaBoniakowski @susieQP8 @sparklyscalpel pic.twitter.com/GEGGXDC59l
— Anna Boniakowski (@AnnaBoniakowski) April 13, 2017
Hoping to challenge assumptions on women in medicine
The woman who are taking part in the challenge hope that it would help change assumptions regarding women in medicine. All around the world, surgery is a male-dominated profession.
In the US, just 195 of surgeons are women, as per the American Medical Association.
According to the Association of Women Surgeons of India, of the 25,000 Indian surgeons, only 700 are women. Last year in March, a Times of India report said that in Hyderabad, women surgeons were a “vanishing tribe.” Records from corporate hospitals in the city revealed that just 10% of their surgeons were women. Nearly all of them were in the obstetrics and gynaecology departments. The number of women in general surgery and ophthalmology were negligible. Even fewer female surgeons were in surgery super specialties like oncology, urology, cardio-thoracis surgery, neurology, plastic surgery and gastroenterology.
The association of Women Surgeons in India has already asked members to join in the mag cover challenge.
“Currently, the state of affairs is such that women surgeons in our country do not even realize the biases they face,” Dr Sristi Sharma, a surgery policy researcher and founder of the Association of Women Surgeons of India. “Sexist comments are normalized, being passed over for leadership positions are accepted, even patient attitudes are tolerated. However, things will not change unless the 700 or so women surgeons stand up and say ‘Look at us-we do exist. And we are no different from you.’”
The first of the Indian women surgeons’ pictures is here:
Image credits: scroll.in