Walking Out on the Boys - Softcover

Here's Frances Conley's description of her medical school anatomy class: "[W]e would become accustomed and oblivious to the fact that little bits of dead flesh would cling to our clothing and our shoes, and entangle in our hair, traveling with us to other classes or even home, as if the dead were making a futile attempt to retain a tenuous tie to the living." Just as she felt overcome by the dead in that class, her neurosurgery career was fraught with sexism and harassment--from her admission as one of just 12 women (out of 60) in her medical school class in 1961 to her decision to resign from Stanford University's School of Medicine 30 years later. Conley has done every patient--and every female doctor--a sincere favor with this memoir of the games that are played within the academic and medical realms. The book has a bad aftertaste, however, because Conley's message is not one of empowerment. She was compelled to resign from her position when the university appointed Dr. Gerald Silverberg as acting chairman of the department. He was later demoted after a sexual harassment investigation and Conley returned to Stanford life, but, as she says, "The academic community has shown little inclination to change 'business as usual.'" Conley, now 57, gives a well-written play-by-play of years of sexual shenanigans and legal proceedings, but offers little in the way of advice for women who find themselves at the receiving end of harassment.

Frances Conley, the first female tenured full professor of neurosurgery in the country, made headline news when she resigned from her position at Stanford University to protest the medical school's long-ingrained overt gender discrimination. In this forthright memoir, Conley describes her medical training, the enormous investment she made in becoming a member of the small, elite, white male world of neurosurgery, and her realization--late in an extraordinarily successful career--that she would never really be a full member of this club.

Conley takes us inside the world of academic medicine, where all doctors are trained but where women are still considered inferior. As a result, research and treatment of women's health problems lag far behind those of men, and women's careers and psyches are suffering. Conley eventually returned to Stanford after some of the changes for which she had fought so hard were initiated, but her story makes it painfully clear that, in spite of their advances, female doctors--as well as all other female hospital staff--still have a long way to go before they are judged on the basis of their abilities rather than on their gender.

A revealing, sometimes shocking account, Walking Out on the Boys should be read by anyone concerned with the future of medicine in America.