Of Locker Rooms and Labor Pains

Being a woman in medicine has its obstacles. I once expected that my gender would diminish in importance with each added year of schooling. That is, I thought that as my gray matter increased in prominence, the casing would become immaterial. As with many other childhood expectations, however, all that remains is a dream.

In grade school, cooties differentiated the sexes. Later, my secondary sex characteristics developed and remarks from the streets initiated me into the realm of womanhood. My intellectual awareness then followed, as college acquainted me with the academic nature of the feminist cause. These three—cooties, catcalls, and Virginia Woolf's “A Room of One's Own”—gave me a vague and distant sense of living in an unjust world. It wasn't until medical school that inequalities broadsided me personally. To heighten the shock, the first blow came from the institution itself and not from an individual person. School hadn't even started when a random dean greeted me:

“Congratulations, you are a class of firsts. You are the first class to use our new science facility, and you are the first class to reflect the general population. This class is comprised of 51% females and 49% males.

Unfortunately, the brand new gross anatomy locker room was designed on the premise that the percentage of female students in medical school would never exceed 30%. So, the women will have to share lockers. Men, you'll have lockers to spare.”

I had just agreed to pay my medical school $33 000 plus interest well into the 21st century, and I couldn't even have my own locker. I didn't think much of …