Favouritism

This is an attempt to articulate my thoughts so far from the back and forth on favouritism in medical school. I believe that everyone is speaking from their different perspectives which are all valid. To start with, I spoke with a female colleague who did not notice this favouritism at all, she claimed that it never occurred to her that females were better treated than their male counterparts, I had to painstakingly point out occasions I had suffered or heard my colleagues suffer to prove its existence to her.

I read a tweet yesterday that said until our senior colleagues/instructors stop to see female medical students or younger female doctors as potential partners, the favouritism will continue to rage unabated. This perception which has some merit to it, is not entirely true. The main reason for the favouritism in my opinion barring the few senior male colleagues who unduly favour female medical students with the hope of a possible romantic attachment, is the fact that most men (who are mostly heterosexual) are generally more attracted to women and will rather be in the company of females rather than males. This brings me back to the tweet I made reference to earlier, indeed it has a lot of truth if we are keeping it a buck. It is worth noting that male medical students do not seem to complain about it because they sort of understand it and are already used to it. I wager that a lot of us will probably do the same thing when in the same shoes of our senior colleagues.

A number of female colleagues argue that the girls are more serious students than the boys and that is entirely what produces the perceived favoritism. In an attempt to correct that notion, I believe that young male medical students are discouraged from trying after they are treated entirely differently from their females colleagues at their first clinical interaction. There is no study to back this claim up, but off the top of my head I can easily say that boys tend to fair better in pre-clinical school than the clinical school and the reason is not far-fetched. Pre-clinical school puts everyone at a level playing ground (similar learning exposure) and the results are only an evidence of the grit and learning capacities of the students, whereas a demography gets more teachings and more clinical exposure in clinical school than the other one and this goes ahead to play a significant role in the outcome of the males and females in clinical school exams.

I read another tweet that tried to sway the direction of the discourse to predatory behaviors suffered by female students that the male students do not experience, the tweet added that despite this obstacle, ladies still come out successful. Indeed, it is a really important topic that may have some bearing on the discussion on ground, but it doesn’t take away the merit of the current discourse and both issues will need to be investigated and steps taken in the right manner to nip the epidemics in the bud.

Finally, I believe that our behavior as human beings can be extrapolated from that of those ahead of us, as we are social beings, therefore, I will go out on a limb to state again that most of these issues being brought up are going to continue to be issues and those currently complaining about will more often than not, remain perpetrators of the same thing they so painfully criticize. It will require a lot of mass self awareness amongst the menfolk to be able to successfully correct this thing we consider a menace.