How female doctors injected change into Australia's body politic - The Australian Financial Review

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In the past two decades, female medical graduates outnumber males by almost two to one.

They work in specialties linked to lengthier, care-based consultations such as paediatrics or psychiatry.

They are less likely to run their own practice and are over-represented in the public sector.

For conservative parties, lancing the rage lies in ridding right-wing politics from an association with male harshness and antipathy.

Even in private sector medicine, there has been a steady shift away from being self-employed to being a wage earner. This has been driven by the desire for flexible employment, as well as the corporatisation of medical practices.

The cost of new technology and consolidation complicated ownership of small practices. Older, usually male, physicians sold up.

The new ones didn’t want to run their own shop, so they became employees of health systems.

It is now private equity overseeing pathology or radiology providers. Large chains such as Healius employ general practitioners as employees or contractors.

Previously an economic bloc of small businessmen, a group much more likely to lean conservative, female doctors are more likely to be part-time wage earners. They earn, on average, a little over half the income of their male colleagues.

Granted those wages may be relatively high, but both American and British studies show self-employed doctors who undertake procedures are twice as likely to vote Republican or Tory.

While at a primitive level, women may spark an association with the maternal, caring archetype, these economic trends are also linked to driving the profession to the left.

They clearly embody the notion of the Brahmin left, a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty to describe the intelligentsia as the new base of left-wing parties.

Even the language of medical accreditation bodies, known as colleges, has shifted to the language of social justice.

In the United States, a recent document promoted by the American Medical Association, titled Advancing Health Equity, encourages physicians to move away from using words like “vulnerable” to describe their patients.

Instead, they are directed to use terminology referred to as more “equity focused”, such as oppressed. By this logic, people are only ever made vulnerable by existing power structures, an extension of left-wing, social justice ideology.

This may be a legitimate world view, but it is one based in ideology, and not science.

Yet, it is being thrust upon doctors across its governing bodies, a trend played out locally. My own College of Psychiatrists has an entire working group dedicated to the growing problem of climate anxiety.

You can guess there is no equivalent committee working to highlight the anxiety arising from unemployment, or high energy costs from decarbonisation.

For all the talk of climate or integrity, the undercurrent of political movements is usually one of status, in this case resentment among professional women about not receiving due acknowledgement within their work and homes.

There has been much commentary about the frustrations of the pandemic being especially borne by women, be it reducing their work hours, doing more housework or being the hard lifters in overseeing children’s education from home.

ABC journalist Annabel Crabb writes: “Unknown to modern political science was the group most consistently ignored and talked-down to by Scott Morrison: professional women.”

But much like other trends, such as digitisation and youth mental health, the pandemic may have sped up pre-existing historical shifts.

Germaine Greer wrote in 1999 that “prestige and power have seeped out of professions as women joined them. Teaching is already rock-bottom; medicine is sliding fast”.

What has happened in my profession of medicine is a marker of a dominant cultural current, one given a sharp exclamation mark during this election.

It is of educated, female professionals, still largely earning wages, doing the bulk of housework and raising children, not feeling they have been given their due by male colleagues, husbands and authorities.

Morrison and climate anxiety may merely be the receptacle absorbing the mass projection.

For conservative parties, lancing this inchoate rage will lie in ridding right- wing politics from an association with male harshness and antipathy.

The answers are not clear, but they almost certainly lie as much in symbolism as in policy.

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