Workplace factors affecting women surgeons.
| Description | Representative quotes |
| Work conditions | |
| work–life balance | ‘I think you use up your twenties, basically exhausted, working to the exclusion of all other things. At least, that was my experience. I didn’t have time with my family. I didn’t have time with my friends, I didn’t have time for relationships, I didn’t have time for extra study.’ (P8) |
| Lack of flexibility | ‘Certainly one of the bosses I worked for when I was first back from maternity leave was awfully hard. She didn’t support at all my choices in choosing to deliver naturally or breastfeed my children.’ (P5) |
| Career progression | |
| Access to networks | ‘There’s this club in surgery, and you’re either in it, or you’re not. You’ve either got the handshake and you’re in the club—and that’s usually if your dad was a surgeon or you went to Boys’ Grammar or you played rugby’ (P40) |
| Role models | ‘Females can be the toughest critics of other females, and I think there’s multiple reasons for that, but if you look at the small number of older females, they had to fit a male model to survive back in those days’ (P3) |
| Climate | |
| Explicit sexism | ‘a female surgeon with children, they were talking about what a crap surgeon she is, and she’s off having babies[…]So if you’re a female trainee standing there operating while the boss is talking about this, about another female consultant, of course that affects you.’ (P15) |
| Harassment and assault | ‘I’ve certainly had some very inappropriate sexual approaches, though. People putting their hands in through my gowns’ (P10) |
| Including low-level harassment | ‘just sex jokes and things[…]anything that would make you blush when you’re a medical school student[…]they try and talk to you and try and get you involved in the joke, and I’d be embarrassed.’ (P9) |
| Work spaces | |
| Change rooms | ‘you miss the opportunity in the change rooms[…]you might be in the change rooms for fifteen minutes, and so that’s fifteen minutes of time with your peer or supervisor that you don’t otherwise get.’ (P6) |