Professionalism Wears a Suit and Tie

Here's a riddle:
A man and his son are out hiking in the mountains. The son has a serious fall and is airlifted to the nearest hospital. When he gets wheeled into the operating theatre, the surgeon looks at him and says, "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son." How can this be true?

This riddle is a well known social experiment, testing inherent gender biases. A study found that less than 15% of participants correctly answered that the surgeon is the boy's mother, with more people willing to believe that he was a gay second father. These results reveal some pretty raw truths about the way we unconsciously perceive women's place in society, especially the workforce. A surgeon is one of the most highly respected professionals in our society, requiring a rigorous ten years of tertiary education and incredible skill. So what does it say about us that we are so unwilling to associate such respect and academic achievement with women, to the point where we will assume a gay relationship, which is a taboo within itself? Ultimately we see that as a society, we almost exclusively associate professionalism with masculinity. The very word immediately conjures up a mental image of suit, tie, cufflinks and shiny Oxfords, which again indicates the essential manliness of the corporate world.

Why? Well it's only a guess, but...

We discourage women from entering these professions. Although med school and law school are increasingly female dominated in Australian universities, our society is geared towards subtly pushing women away from actually becoming surgeons, barristers, and any other profession at the highest level. From media portrayals to the gender of the smiling student on the pamphlet, women usually only see themselves represented as nurses, secretaries, and maybe GPs. Meanwhile, their equivalent male students are constantly surrounded by positive, masculine representations of people just like them achieving at the very top. As an isolated incident, this would be harmless. But after a lifetime of having these messages metaphorically whispered in your ear, they begin to have a very real effect until we see that although over half of medical students are women, only 30% of Australian surgeons are female.

When women do manage to circumvent the glass ceiling and actually achieve high standards of professionalism, they are treated with far less respect than their male counterparts in the public eye. From little things like constantly having people be surprised when they realise a woman is a surgeon, to female barristers having less clients simply because people subconsciously assume that a manly "Mr" in front of a name indicates better professionalism. Women are perceived to be of less quality than the men in their fields, and this then trickles back down and discourages potential Nobel Prize winners from pushing their careers under the implicit assumption they will never "make it".

Women nowadays have more degrees, higher university marks, and just as much enthusiasm for the workforce as men have ever had. However our assumptions about the inherent masculinity of professionalism invisibly blocks women from achieving what they deserve.

Xx
Hannah