My take on feminism is that it just means equal rights and equal treatment, so fuck yeah I’m a feminist.
I once had a physical therapist tell me she wasn’t a feminist because she thought women couldn’t be as physically capable as men when serving as soldiers
That argument has always seemed like a cop-out to me. The division there is with physical ability, not gender. Establish the physical requirements and call it a day. There are weak-ass men who have no business getting near fields like that; and strong-ass women who blow the physical requirements out of the water.
Overall, men will pull ahead in jobs that emphasize physical labor - that’s fine. The flip side is also true, with other jobs favoring the anatomy and physiology of women. Aviation comes to mind. Especially if we’re still in the context of military, size and weight both need to be LOW. So same spiel - establish the requirements as the job demands and call it a day; weight and size limits will tend to favor women.
In either case, marking it as men-only or women-only is fucking stupid; but the demands of a specific career field leaning into anatomical and psychologic advantages of one sex vs the other is fine so long as the numbers reflect the actual demands.
*This does come with the need for and oversight, though, as the potential for abusing a system like that is high in order to accomplish sexist goals.
There’s something to be said for the mental side as well. Speaking as a surgical tech, the best techs I’ve worked with have consistently been women. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, and I’m backing this on the tiny field of view I’ve had into this field, but anecdotally, women are just better. I get a similar impression looking to the nurses and doctors, but I don’t have the expertise to really judge either of those.
Tldr, utilize people’s strengths, but don’t be a sexist asshole about it.
Oh, right on! I’ve only worked at a few different hospitals, so the sample size of my anecdote is pretty tiny, but I’ve noticed two trends that seem to contribute:
With newer surgeons, women are quicker to recognize when shit’s getting out of their experience level, and ask for help from their seniors before an emergency unfolds. Men tend to dig themselves into a hole first, then call a senior for a rescue as an absolute last resort.
With seasoned surgeons, women tend to be nicer to their team; men tend to be assholes. This is problematic if someone on the team is more timid - there have been instances where someone notices something like a hole in the surgeon’s glove, but didn’t say anything about it because they were afraid of inciting the surgeon’s anger… and then the patient ends up with an infection. As the tech or nurse in the OR, you need to bold as fuck sometimes. I.e., when I was a couple years into this job, we were wrapping up a big open-belly case, surgeon starts closing while the nurse and I were doing our counts. Counts were no good - one of our lap sponges was unaccounted for. “Doc, stop closing, we’re missing a sponge” …he ignored me and kept closing… so I reach over with a pair of scissors and cut the needle off the suture he was using. He proceeds to lose his shit, we do a sweep of the abdomen, and sure as shit there’s the missing lap. Then he doubles down and starts snapping about how lucky I was that it was in there. Both the nurse and I start chewing him out - literally doesn’t matter if it’s not in there, if your surg tech says there might be a retained sponge, you stop what you’re doing and start looking for that sponge. Were I less blunt with that dude, he’d have finished that stitch and closed the cavity, so now the nurse has to chart that a cavity was closed with a wrong count, then legal gets involved. I literally saved that dude from some serious trouble, but he was too butthurt to be anything other than pissed.
Anyway, women tend not to pull shut like that. Every time I’ve needed to call the room to a halt with a female surgeon, she’s just been on board with addressing the problem. Men feel like I’m challenging them personally that they need to contest; women see it as a challenge to the entire team that we all collectively need to resolve.
To be clear, most surgeons male or female just want what’s best for the patient and don’t put up a fight when I raise a concern… but when there is pushback, it’s generally from a man.
Hadn’t considered that, but you’re probably right. Female doctors get a lot more stupid pushback. A year or so ago, I was in a thyroid case, doc was one of the younger women on the ENT crew. Also super small. …and people treat her like a fucking child. Anyway, we had recently had issues with pathology following her orders, so once she was done taking specimens, she ran them down to pathology herself to make sure everything went smoothly… the lab tech who received them literally told her to ‘go back to the OR and ask the surgeon to clarify the order’ lol. She would have been 100% justified in exploding at that tech, but she didn’t cuz she’s actually a decent person. That kind of shit never happens to men. I’ve been called ‘doctor’ more times than I can count, despite the giant green “TECH” label hanging below my name tag. “Quite the promotion, sir, but if you’re not trying to kill the patient you should probably bounce that question off of someone who knows what they’re doing.”