Scarlett McNally: Unleashing the talent of women doctors can improve everyone’s health
BMJ 2025; 388 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r419 (Published 05 March 2025) Cite this as: BMJ 2025;388:r419
- Scarlett McNally, professor
- scarlettmcnally{at}cantab.net
Follow Scarlett on X @scarlettmcnally
International women’s day falls on 8 March every year. As the outgoing president of the Medical Women’s Federation, I want this year’s celebration to be followed by action. The number of women doctors in the UK has doubled in the past 20 years.1 This is a large but undervalued workforce, so improving their working lives would have the additional benefit of improving health across the population.
The key to this change is to talk about sexism and systemic barriers in medicine.23 We must challenge sexist generalisations about individual women doctors while also understanding that some general systemic factors are more likely to limit their careers than those of men. Pregnancy, child rearing, caring for elderly parents, or being overlooked for opportunities and development are factors affecting women doctors at critical phases, preventing career progression.
The prevailing model of healthcare—a continuum of symptoms, investigations, diagnosis, treatment, and cure—doesn’t fit our increasingly complex population with multiple long term conditions. Diverse and collaborative teams work better together and have better patient outcomes.45 Patients of women doctors also fare slightly better.67 This may partly be because some team members and patients feel more comfortable approaching them with questions. Many of the UK’s 160 000 women doctors have untapped expert potential to improve health, prevent unwarranted interventions, and lead teams—but to do this they need to be acknowledged, valued, and supported.
Change is needed at the individual, departmental, structural, cultural, and process levels to improve women doctors’ experience8 and the population’s health. Too often, people mistake women doctors for other staff members or for more junior staff and therefore miss the opportunity to discuss treatments and draw on their expertise. The Medical Women’s Federation suggests a campaign for the public, with posters exhorting, “Your doctor is a woman—ask her about your treatment options rather than telling her she is pretty.”9 Other posters suggest things that other staff should and shouldn’t say to women doctors and medical students, as well as prompting supervisors to prioritise skill development and shared decision making.9
Retention and support
Last month NHS England launched a review of postgraduate medical training,10 and 57% of resident doctors are now women.11 The postgraduate training years should be structured, financed, and planned to get doctors through to deliver decades of excellent future service, with residents becoming consultants, GPs, and SAS doctors. These few years are a bottleneck that often coincides with pregnancy, breastfeeding, looking after small children, or returning from leave. Too many have a difficult experience, leave, or make career decisions based on negative perceptions about this phase of life.12 Resident doctors feel pressure to cover rota gaps1213 while also facing intense competition for posts.14 An increase in training posts, some perhaps converted from locally employed doctor posts, would improve wellbeing now and soon deliver a valuable part of the future senior NHS workforce.
Doctors, especially resident doctors, spend up to half their time on administrative work.12131516 Normalising doctors’ assistants17 and other support roles would help retain women doctors, increasing the time and flexibility they need to develop essential competencies for progression. To benefit from a larger talented pool of potential NHS leaders, all NHS clinical leadership roles should be advertised as role shares, with adequate administrative and other support.
We need to value each other and nurture everyone’s talent. If we can improve training, clinical and administrative support, and professional interactions for women doctors, we will improve these aspects for all doctors. Redefining health for the nation needs women doctors to be valued.
Footnotes
Competing interests: Scarlett McNally is a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, president of the Medical Women’s Federation, and deputy director of the Centre for Perioperative Care.
Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.