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Open Letter

April 19, 2020

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1702010

This open letter is addressed to Young Female Physicians, and the entire letter details the hardships female physicians face in their careers, namely imposter syndrome. I am a young female going into the medical field, so this letter resonated pretty seriously with me. I already have faced a lot of sexism in the medical world. At interviews for medical schools, many of the men in the room were very outspoken and got answers to their questions first by speaking over the women in the room. When shadowing physicians, I was not granted the same opportunities as my male counterparts. The same doctors that silenced me and shut down my questions let the men in the group participate in patient care and offered to be references for them. The more “bro-y” groups, like the EMTs and flight nurse staff, made efforts to connect with my male groupmates and ignored me as much as possible when I was with them for a day. Many of the male students were offered opportunities to shadow intense surgeries at odd hours while none of the female students were. Male physicians would point me towards more “female appropriate specialties” when I was scheduled to shadow them. Now, this is not to say every single doctor and opportunity was biased towards men, but in my very limited medical experience so far, there have already been multiple occasions of clear favoritism towards the men in the group based on nothing more than the fact that they are men and I am a female.

I also definitely feel a lot of imposter syndrome. I can make excuses for any accomplishment I have achieved so far, and when I have successes they often don’t feel real or I don’t feel I am worthy of them. Even getting into medical school made me feel like a fraud. For every acceptance, I would check and recheck the same email or letter, making sure they didn’t send it to the wrong person or address by mistake, and even then feeling like I somehow fooled them into thinking I would be a good candidate for medical school. Even now, as I prepare to commit to a school and start in a few months, it all still feels like I will show up and be told it is all some huge mistake. Reading this letter and seeing another physician’s take on imposter syndrome reassures me that many physicians have these feelings and worry they aren’t or won’t be good enough regardless of their training or accomplishments. 

This letter also helps me put everything into perspective and see how to most effectively excel in the medical field. As I move forward with my career, there will be many obstacles, some due to the nature of the medical field and others due to gender biases. I need to make sure I have strong female role models and mentors, as well as be open and honest with my peers, since many of them will have the same or similar worries that we can work through together. I also need to make sure I am putting in the necessary effort and acknowledging how much work I have put in and what I have accomplished. While imposter syndrome is very real, so is all the hard work that goes into becoming a physician. Moving forward, I hope to take my experiences and mindset as a woman in medicine and turn them into a compassionate and illustrious career.

References

Letter to a Young Female Physician by Dr. Suzanne Koven, M.D.