Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Steve Farnham, a resident of Plainfield.
Dr. Katharine Hikel’s opinion piece, “What women want,” strikes at the heart of one of several problems facing our community, but I am not sure that getting more women in charge is necessarily going to help.
Let’s say your goal is equal opportunity for women, and that the place you chose to make that happen is the NFL. You lobby Congress, and succeed in passing a law requiring that at least half of the players on any given team are women. How will these women play? In a word: rough. If they don’t, they’ll be pummelled to death, and their team will lose to other teams that do play rough cause that is the nature of the sport.
So why are we deluding ourselves into thinking that when placed in a men’s job market, women will behave any different than they would if they enter a man’s sport? With men already dominating the business world, how else are women to behave and survive? If the rules stipulate that the most cutthroat win, and no one bothers to change that, then when women play, the only difference will be that now some of the winning cutthroats are women. The situation with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, cited by Judith Levine at the end of Dr. Hikel’s piece, seems to demonstrate this phenomenon. Why is this either a surprise or an improvement?
Dr. Hikel seems pretty beset by the high percentage of officers of ACOG (American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) that are men. And she bludgeons the reader with the implication that UVM’s OBGYN will show great improvement under the leadership of women.
Possibly, but she is leaving a hole in her argument big enough to drive a hospital through. The news is filled with all sorts of incidents of unnecessary medical and surgical treatments being foisted onto unwitting people, not just cesareans. Often these procedures cause more trouble than they prevent. I ask Dr. Hikel, where are the facts and numbers that demonstrate that this problem is limited to (or worse in) the birthing unit?
If unnecessary medical procedures abound in other departments of hospitals, is that because they are also dominated by men? Are there any profit-mongering women running any departments responsible for performing unnecessary surgical procedures? Can Dr. Hikel point to another department (or another medical facility) run mostly by women, which is not performing excess surgery in pursuit of profit?
Is it possible that the reason “men are still in charge,” is because fewer women are drawn to some of these jobs? Perhaps some prefer to stay home and raise their babies rather than try to run the part of the hospital where they are born? Whether male or female, if an administrator of a major department in a university or hospital has children of his own at home, it would seem such a person would have to first take his parenting instinct and bash it in the head with a rock before he could avail himself to the demands of his job.
I submit that such demands would make a sane parent of either gender prefer child rearing to climbing the corporate ladder, and that the dearth of women in certain areas of management therefore may only demonstrate their choosing their children over a corporate career. I’m not promoting this choice — merely suggesting that it may reflect women’s preferences, including in UVM’s OBGYN department.
Dr. Hikel’s writing “Women’s health care reform is sadly neglected in the larger reform debate,” misses the point that all health care reform is sadly neglected in the larger debate, and that the problem with health care is the same problem plaguing everything else: excessive profit motive, and giving the profit motive priority consideration. Unless we change the rules, it is very possible that putting women in charge will only add to the team in charge of the destruction.
So how about backing off the OBGYN man-bashing, and look at the whole problem. Perhaps the whole problem can be laid at the feet of men — wouldn’t surprise me, but let’s be sure. The letter which successfully urged the women running Susan G. Komen to reverse their ban on funding breast screening at Planned Parenthood, was signed by twice as many male senators as female senators, two of whom one source characterized as “relatively conservative.”
Once again, I urge the fire-breathing female movers and shakers to attack the philosophies of the men in charge, not the mere fact that they happen to be male. If you think getting women in control is the panacea, I have four words for you: “Michele Bachmann” and “Sarah Palin.”
