“Csurgeon “since words also count in a story of empowerment, let’s start from here, from the difficulty that Dusted Gaya has made people accept the word in a professional world where excellence is measured (goes) to the neutral, no matter if it coincides with the masculine. “After all there are very few top surgeons in Italy: three primary, three full professors, a dozen associate professors “. And under?
Gaya Spolverato, oncologist surgeon at the University of Padua, president of Women in Surgery Italy.
The surgeons are left behind
«There are no precise numbers because nThere is no order of those who specialize in surgery, all medical graduates are gathered in a single association, doctors and surgeons. But there are more and more women, capable, very capable. In the the first two years of activity are the best in the relationship with patients, in the work in the ward. But when it comes to putting an extra person in the operating room, the chiefs, almost all men, end up choosing a boy.
It is not always a conscious discrimination, but in fact it is what happens ».
30 – 40 years: the critical moment
«This gives men one more chance to come into play, to mature that experience that from a simpler intervention leads to work on more complex cases. And the women slide back. There are those who say that as more and more women are graduating in medicine and choosing to be surgeons, the problem will be solved soon.
But that’s not the case, because in the moment of the career shot professional, the 30-40 years in which it is also the time to have children, you do not select a woman as you would for a man. If a woman wins a competition while on maternity leave, for example, she happens to be hired when she returns. They are months of less salary …
And if the number of female surgeons does not increase who gets to manage a department, the growth curve will not change ».
Research and room
Gaya Spolverato instead did a fulminating career. And now he plays it to lend a hand to the others, for breaking the glass ceiling that deprives women surgeons of recognition and spaces in health leadership and deprives health care and therefore all of us citizens of their strategic vision. How did you come to be an associate professor before the age of 40, an ambitious goal even for a male colleague?
And why an award a Women in Surgery Italythe network of women surgeonsof which he is president?
Research and experience in the operating room, for a prestigious curriculum.
“I worked before as researcher at John Hopkins University in Baltimoreand then how surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the largest cancer treatment center in the world. I had a double important competence, research and operating room, and in 2018 I returned to Italy where with that curriculum I managed to get to an important position.
It’s at stabilize my private life as well: I have two children, three years and one month old, born in Italy where the two projects, unbridled passion for work and family life, can be integrated with more serenity than in the USA.
“Italian” career
In Padua Gaya Spolverato also holds the position of Vice Rector, delegated to the University’s equal opportunities policies.
[[
«I want to avoid with the Wis Italia network that good and determined colleagues have to take the road to the States in a lasting way to launch your career. And that they are able to grow professionally by cultivating research and field work at the same time ».
Bring out the gap
For this reason, the Women in Surgery Italia association has been conducting a lresearch work to bring out the criticalities of the situation. Studies published on international scientific journalswhich show how there is a lack of balance between family and career and the creeping prejudice.
Surgeons in Italy still have fewer career opportunities.
“But the reason we received the Leads award fromWomen Leaders in Healthcare Association is the mentorship project for female surgeons at the beginning of their careers »says Professor Spolverato.
20 young surgeons
The project, made possible by the support of the University of Padua, is a national project that is open to all Women in Surgery members who are specializing, in the first two years of their career or, if enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of Padua, in the sixth year of the degree course in Medicine. On an experimental basis, the process, which has already started, lasts six months to allow for an ideal running-in and involves 20 young surgeons.
We have formed 20 mentor couples (woman or man, also according to personal affinities), and mentee to support young professionals in the initial and decisive moment for their career. It is in the crest between graduation and choice of specialization and then at the beginning of school that direct and indirect pressure on women surgeons, who “warn” them of the difficulty of undertaking this career multiply ».
It is there that they are discouraged and that the change (of the social organization, of the rebalancing of roles, in the family and in the mental representations of each one) never takes place.
Form the primary
Dusted Gaya he repeats that he has an unbridled passion for his work (as well as for his own family, he underlines, and “If ours as a health professional is a care job, what contradiction can there ever be between one and the other?»). But I’m also working on a leadership project for women in health care to train the primary of the future.
A program that starts from characteristics that are found more in women than in men and that are not rewarding with the current model of selection and training of managers. Far from it. A preparation that must not insist on the contents – “on those, remembers Spolverato, we are too good”, but on communication, on the culture of leadership, on the ability to network, on a way of being a leader that does not necessarily have to be modeled on the male.
iO Donna © REPRODUCTION RESERVED