Physician Mothers Work Less

Politicians promising free healthcare for everyone don’t like to talk about it. But, the healthcare you get for free is not necessarily going to be the healthcare you or your private insurance company pays for. The notion that you can completely revolutionize the system without diminishing quality problems is absurd.

Recall that Obamacare imposed new record keeping requirements on physicians. On its face, it was a good idea. Would it not be better if physicians had a patient records in a database. Then they could quickly check on medical history and different medications.

And yet, physicians did not like or could not afford the new system. It took up too much time and required them to hire new office personnel. A certain number of them decided to quit the profession. Thus, a sensible plan contribute to the physician shortage.

And, of course, when we say shortage we are not saying whether the best people will still want to be physicians. If the best and the brightest choose different careers, the medical profession will increasingly attract only those with mediocre talents. Would rather your physician graduated at the top or the bottom of the class?

Now, the profession has discovered another face to the physician shortage problem. Many of its best physicians are women. This might reflect the fact that the profession is less about prospering and more about caring. Or it might mean that the best men are looking elsewhere for careers. But, many of these women have children. Given their conflicting priorities many of these mothers are working less or are dropping out of medicine… thus, contributing to a physician shortage.

The UPI reports the study, from the American Medical Association, thus, from a reliable source:

More and more women doctors are cutting work hours or leaving the medical profession altogether to spend time with their families, findings show.

Researchers found 40 percent of female physicians either reduced their hours to part-time or quit working, according to a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open. Experts worry this exodus could add to the growing doctor shortage in the United States.

"We know that patients of female physicians have lower hospital readmission rates and lower mortality in comparison to patients of male physicians," Constance Guille, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina and study senior author, said in a news release. "Further, when we lose women in medicine, we lose the potential for them as leaders in health care. This is really important given that gender diversity in leadership is highly associated with better profits and decision making."

Of course, it’s gender diversity uber alles. This researcher does not ask whether the choice is good for these women’s children, or not. She does not care. So, we have responsible mothers choosing to spend more time with their children, because they, as physicians understand the value of spending time with children. And the medical profession does not care about the effect on their children. It only cares about gender diversity. Constance Gulle does not care about the human potential lost by children who suffer from maternal neglect.

The report shows us how the study was conducted. 

The researchers asked 167 male and 177 female doctors about their preferences to work either part-time or full-time. Then they produced word clouds from those answers.

The typical words that jumped out for men were "need money," "loan" and "financial."

By contrast, the terms that stood out for women were "childcare responsibilities," "balancing work" and "family and children".

Nothing about these associations should have surprised anyone. Men are men and women are women. Despite the best efforts of our gender bending thought police men remain men and women remain women. And women place a priority on being good mothers, even in being great mothers. Why neglect your own child in order to care for someone else’s?

As I said, the commentators have no respect for these physician mothers. They believe that they can solve the problem by creating more daycare facilities in hospitals:

Guille says this disparity in terms highlights the need to create childcare programs that help retain doctors.

"Having resources that can help you take care of your family while you're taking care of your work, such as on-site daycare, flexibility in work hours and paid maternity leave, would be helpful," Guille said.

Of course, this is idiotic. It’s the kind of idiotic you produce when you are an ideologue. Don’t you think that these highly education physician mothers considered the option of throwing their children into daycare? Wouldn't they have done it if they thought that daycare was an adequate substitute for maternal care?

But these mothers know, as Gulle does not, that daycare does not provide what a mother provides. The subject has been researched ad nauseam, and the conclusions always seem to show that mothers make the best mothers. Duh!

No group can be expected to know this as well as women who have completed medical training. How about a little respect for the decisions that women make? Isn’t that part of freedom to choose?