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55 lines
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<p class="photoTitle">Dr. Frances K. Conley</p>
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<!-- BEGIN DISPLAY OF Transcript -->
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<p>I had a number of professors who tried to talk me out of my decision to pursue a career in surgery, and I’m not exactly sure why,
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although I think that their perception of the lifestyle of the surgeon was not compatible with being a woman. At that point I was married,
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and I’m sure that the general assumption at that time was that if you’re married you are going to have a family,
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and that the two—a career in surgery and having a family—were incompatible.</p>
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<p>Surgery is just such fun. It is a wonderful discipline because you get a chance to do your thinking beforehand. You have to make
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fairly rapid decisions, and you have to live by those decisions. And what I really enjoyed about it was the planning and execution
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of "the perfect case." Of doing things meticulously, correctly, efficiently, and having a very happy outcome with it.
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And one’s ego gets very involved in surgery. And I guess my ego needed to be fed, and surgery did that for me very well.
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In 1991, I gave up my position as a tenured full professor of neurosurgery at the Stanford Medical School. And I did so because
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a person was elevated to be the chair of my department who I felt was a very sexist person.</p>
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<p>The dean had articulated the desire to create an environment at the medical school that was more hospitable to those of
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us who were different—i.e., women and minorities. And his putting this person into a position of the deanship was antithetical to
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what he had espoused as his intent. And so I quit.</p>
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<p>I had tremendous power at that particular time. I was a tenured full professor. And there were very few tenured full professors that were women who were
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neurosurgeons. I had been elected to a number of things at the University so I was very well known, and had a lot of support behind me,
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so that I dealt my hand with a fair amount of power behind it. The difference that I made when I took a stand on looking at or exploring the
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differential treatment that women received in medicine—the difference was, that it woke people up. All of a sudden, that which had been just
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accepted as part of the medical world, as normative behavior—that you can pat nurses on their butts, and you call people "honey" in front of patients,
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and that you can do this—that was normative behavior, and nobody questioned it. And I think the difference that I created was it made people stop in
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their tracks, and it made them think, Hey, is this right? Am I treating my women patients the same way I do my men patients—with respect, and with dignity—and am I giving them as much of me as I should be giving them? And so from that point of view, yes, I think it did make a big difference.
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Did I correct things? No, not totally.</p>
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