The Mother of All Work-Life Balances
Women pursuing motherhood while practicing medicine face age-old challenges
There’s been a recent flurry of articles on working women delaying motherhood until they’ve established their careers.
According to a survey cited by Forbes, 36 percent of women over the age of 35 who choose to have a child later in life do so because they want to achieve their professional goals first.
For women in medicine, the choice to have a child can come at a particularly unhealthy cost.
Calculating the situation and its consequences
A JAMA article — pointedly titled “Childbearing, Infertility, and Career Trajectories Among Women in Medicine” — spotlights the situation this demographic faces, stating that “the duration and intensity of medical training…coincides with women’s peak reproductive years.”
Indeed, “despite strong knowledge of age-related fertility decline,” a full three-fourths of the 1,056 women physicians surveyed reported delaying motherhood. More than one-third of those surveyed experienced infertility.
Just as distressingly, “[n]early half of women with children reported passing up opportunities for career advancement to accommodate family building and parenthood.”
There are several more articles in the same vein.
One features a group of 1,004 female oncologists, of whom “95 percent stated that their career plans were at least somewhat associated with the timing of family planning; 31 percent reported difficulty with infertility, requiring counseling or treatment; and up to 33 percent reported discrimination during pregnancy and maternity leave.”
And yet, women can thrive both as medical practitioners and as parents. In fact, they’ve done so for decades. We turned to our Oral History Project archives to help better understand this trend.
Just do it
These headlines are hardly news to Deborah German, MD, the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation’s 2014 Alma Dea Morani Awardee.
She’s been vice president of health affairs at the University of Central Florida since 2010 and the founding dean of UCF’s College of Medicine since 2006.
She’s also a mother — despite the demands of medical training.
“I knew that I always wanted to have children,” Dr. German recalled. “I started thinking I’d better have some children soon, or this isn’t going to happen. And when I saw what lay ahead — internship, residency, senior residency, and then a fellowship — I remember in my internship year realizing that there was no good time to have a baby.
“And that realization led me to: you just have to do it.”
Succeeding on her terms and timeline
She achieved her goal of motherhood thanks to an incredible feat of time management.
“As an intern, I looked forward three years and decided that I would have my child at the very end of my senior residency before I went to fellowship. I realized that I had to have this all figured out because there was no maternity leave. And your vacations were planned out three years in advance. I had a vacation April 1st through the 7th in 1979. I realized that if I wanted to have a baby, I had to have her on April 1 so I could have a week off.”
While interviewing for her fellowship, Dr. German was direct with program directors. “I would say, ‘I want to be the best mother I can be, and if I can do that, I will be the best fellow that you can have.”
She accepted a fellowship in rheumatic and genetic diseases at Duke University—and welcomed her first child right on schedule.
When asked if she has advice for aspiring mothers in the medical field, Dr. German demurred.
“There isn’t any ‘best advice’,” she said. “The best advice you have is: you’re going to do this.”
A treasure trove of inspiration
This multitasking medical leader is just one of the ten pioneering women who have shared their life stories in the Alma Dea Morani Renaissance Women in Medicine Oral History Project. The online archive — funded by the Foundation — features videos and transcripts of these trailblazers’ interviews.
Each woman’s story reveals that the challenges facing their peers today are timeless.
And that they can be overcome.