Resources

Women in Medicine
By Danielle Schroth

A few weeks ago, two female leaders in the field of medicine, Dr. Sasha Shillcutt and Dr. Dana Corriel, shared their insights and advice in response to our Women in Medicine survey results. You may have seen our short video on the data featuring an InCrowd team member.

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At InCrowd, we are lucky to work within an organization that is made successful in part due to its culture of support and respect. We recognize that other people do not always have the opportunity to work in an environment like this, including many women in the medical field.  

Recently, we took a look at the demographics of InCrowd’s 35,000 healthcare professionals and discovered that our Crowd has greatly increased the presence of women across all of our healthcare professions over the last 2 years.

This balance did not happen overnight, it was thoughtfully and intentionally developed. We sought out female physicians through social media and also through a partnership with the Physician Moms Group.  This online Facebook group is a terrific resource for women who are grappling with the challenges of being a woman and a doctor. With their partnership and promotion, we increased the number of women in our Crowd by another 10% in just a few months.

In order to obtain the most meaningful research responses, we are committed to building a Crowd that is representative of the general population of healthcare professionals.

In addition to research topics from biotech and pharmaceutical partners, we also conduct research surveys internally with our Crowd. Most recently, we wanted to hear from female physicians and learn about their experiences in the medical field. We have also surveyed nurses regarding harassment in the workplace. We routinely launch these surveys to help the industry better understand the perspective of women in medicine.

In our open end Women in Medicine research, we asked 50 female physicians about their personal experiences. These women had an average of 8 years in practice, were also around 39 years old and had a lot to share on the topic of being a woman in the medical field.  The word “challenging” was a main take away from this research.

What did “challenging” mean? To them it was a challenge to combat discrimination, harassment, and disrespect both from patients and unfortunately, from colleagues too.

They discussed the challenging aspect of balancing a home and work life, motherhood and a professional career, and the judgement that can surround that decision.  One of the guest bloggers we mentioned, Dr. Corriel, wrote her post on this very topic, read more here. All of these challenges are incredibly frustrating, but it isn’t the whole story.

Women also said their medical careers were  “exciting,” “empowering” and “rewarding” and while one gynecologist from TN acknowledged that there is still discrimination, she also said being a female physician was, “lovely. empowering. everyday there are less and less gender stereotypes and more respect and encouragement.” Dr. Sasha Shillcutt wrote on the topic, encouraging students to pursue medicine because of how rewarding it is. “I tell them that medicine for me, is the single most rewarding job I do besides parenting. I tell them that I know the work I do makes a difference in the life of someone else. I tell them it is full of both heartache and unbelievable reward.”

As we previously mentioned, InCrowd also surveyed 200 US nurses on the topic of workplace discrimination and the respondents were ⅓ male and ⅔ female.  When asked, 81% of all nurses, both male and female, answered that verbal and/or physical harassment of female nurses in the workplace is a problem.

Several nurses commented that they, and many of their colleagues, had accepted that harrassment was just part of the job.

We will continue to follow women in healthcare and are excited to find new ways to invite them and connect with them. And we want to hear from you! Tell us your ideas for what you’d like us to ask them next, or if you’d like to join our Crowd.

Want to know more about our business offerings? Contact info@incrowdnow.com

 

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