In the UK, the number of girls entering university as medical students currently exceeds the number of boys: 55% compared to 45%. Female GP trainees outnumber male in a ratio of 2:1, and over 50% of the workforce in General Practice are women. However, it hasn’t always been this way. Read on to find out more about women in Medicine with this short history.
Gender Norms
Until the late 1800s, the focus of girls’ education was towards their role as wives and mothers. Skills such as how to make delicate conversation, sew or manage servants were taught to the rich. Whereas most of the poor had little access to schooling and literacy rates in lower social classes were low.
Universities were open only to men. And even when they started to accept a small number of women, the ladies had to seek permission to attend lectures and were not awarded degrees. In fact, Medicine was one of the last professions in the UK to permit women to enter.
Oxford and Cambridge were the last universities to award full degrees to women. There were outraged protests in fierce opposition to this, with male students burning female effigies and throwing fireworks at the windows of the women’s colleges.
Trailblazing Women in Medicine
More than 50 years before women were allowed to practise medicine, one woman went to extreme lengths to conceal her identity in order to pursue her chosen profession. Dr James Barry, born Margaret Bulkley, presented herself to Edinburgh University as a 20 year old male, and qualified as a doctor in 1812.
She went on to practice as a surgeon in the British Army and rose to the post of Inspector General of Hospitals. She was thought of as rather eccentric, as a teetotal vegetarian who liked to travel with a menagerie of small animals. The secret of James’ true gender was concealed to most until her death in 1865. The charwoman who washed the body discovered “he” was “a perfect female” and furthermore surmised – from stretch marks on the abdomen – that she had once given birth!
Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to be officially registered by the GMC in 1858, having obtained her Medical Degree in New York. The first woman to qualify as a doctor in the UK in 1865 was Elizabeth Garret Anderson. Sophia Jex Blake was the first female doctor to practice in Scotland.
She completed her medical studies in Edinburgh but faced fierce resentment. On arrival at Surgeon’s Hall to sit an anatomy exam in 1870 a mob of 200 male protestors threw mud, rubbish and insults at her. Despite passing the same examinations as her male counterparts, she received only a Certificate of Proficiency rather than a degree. Sophia finally obtained her Medical Degree in Germany in 1874, before returning to the UK.
Levelling the Playing Field
In 1874, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex Blake opened The London School of Medicine for Women. It was the first medical school in Britain to allow women to graduate and practice Medicine. In 1886, Sophia established the Edinburgh Medical School for Women.
By 1900, there were 200 female doctors practicing in the UK. This number grew gradually. Although strong opposition and negative attitudes to their pursuit of education and training in the medical profession remained.
In 1905, Dr Van Dyke, the president of the Oregon State Medical Society, stated, “Hard study killed sexual desire in women, took away their beauty, brought on hysteria, neurasthenia, dyspepsia, astigmatism and dysmenorrhea. Educated women could not bear children with ease because study arrested the development of the pelvis at the same time it increased the size of the child’s brain and therefore its head. This caused extensive suffering in childbirth.”
The numbers of female medical trainees in Britain increased during the First and Second World Wars due to the necessity of men to leave the country to fight. However, there was still much gender discrimination in selection for medical school places and “marriage bars” were commonplace meaning that women could be asked to resign from professions once they married or became pregnant. Even by 1975 it was still perfectly legal to employ a man instead of a woman, for no other reason than their gender.
Thankfully, in the 1970s the playing field began to level thanks to The Women’s Liberation Movement and The Sex Discrimination Act. Women could no longer be asked to resign if they married. And applications to medical schools were considered on a formalised basis of merit rather than social class or gender.
Looking Forward
It has been a long struggle for women to have equal rights to education and employment in the UK. I am truly grateful to the pioneering, courageous, resilient women who fought this battle for us.
That’s why at IYASU, we have chosen to honour a few of the outstanding women in Medicine who have fought for social equality, revolutionised medical science and achieved inspirational feats of academic or humanitarian work.
Amongst those are:
In addition, we are painfully aware that too many girls around the world still do not have access to education.
That is why we are supporting the Malala Foundation who are working worldwide to improve access for 130 million girls to go to school. They have projects in: Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, Lebanon, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
