Examining a Chronic Case of Sexism Among Surgeons
Frances Conley was never the sort of woman who saw sexual harassment lurking be hind every off-color joke. Back in the 1960s, when she was the only woman training to become a neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical School, she quickly learned to shrug off the teasing, the purportedly playful groping and to respond with wisecracks of her own.
Conley went on to become a practicing neurosurgeon and a scientist who published research results on brain tumors. She also held a professorship at Stanford, making her the first tenured female neurosurgeon in the country. In May 1991, however, she found herself doing something that would have astonished her earlier self: She resigned her tenured position, no longer willing to tolerate what she had come to see as the school’s continuing pattern of bias against women.
Her story made headlines all over the country, which would soon be hearing Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas. Like most stories, Conley’s became somewhat oversimplified in the media’s retellings and still more blurred in the memory of the general public. Fortunately, she has taken the time in “Walking Out on the Boys” to look back and set down for the record not only the events immediately surrounding her dramatic resignation but also the larger story of her long career as a woman in a specialty dominated by men.
“One survived in this masculine world by being one of the boys,” she reflects, “and for all intents and purposes I had become one of them. Only I received much more physical attention, having legs that were stroked, a neck that was caressed, breasts that were a topic of conversation as to their size and shape. Frequently offended, I dared not offend, for fear of banishment from the only professional camaraderie I had ever known. Not wanting to lose my quasi-membership in the surgeons’ club, I had never done anything to stop behavior that was repulsive to me and ultimately damaging to my self-respect.”
The immediate cause of Conley’s resignation was her opposition to the prospect of having one of her colleagues appointed chairman of their department. She knew the man to be a gifted neurosurgeon, but based on his disparaging attitude and behavior, she felt convinced that, as an administrator, he would not support her research once he was in charge. He had always been prone to lewd wisecracks, but Conley felt his recent behavior toward her had reached a new low: On one occasion, he’d burst in to tease her in the middle of an operation. Other women farther down the totem pole--nurses, students, clerks--complained of more blatant harassment: grabbing, inappropriate touching and sexual propositions. Nor was this doctor the only one accused of such conduct.
Indeed, Conley had long noticed sexist attitudes at the many professional conferences she had attended across the country. After years of dismissing such behavior, she finally felt the scales drop from her eyes.
“Inherently, I knew sexist behavior was wrong, but thought I was above it. . . . I realized I might well have damaged the professional lives of others, because [of] my own inaction.” Stories came out of the woodwork. Not only in her own department but throughout the medical school, women were being harassed, belittled, assailed by unwanted propositions and ignored or dismissed when they attempted to complain.
A critical point in Conley’s self-education was realizing that the distinction she had previously made between sexual harassment and sexism was virtually meaningless. All the joking, the groping, the so-called “flirting” had much less to do with sex in the erotic sense than with men making sure everyone knew who was the boss and who was a mere handmaiden.
Without falling into self-dramatizing theatrics or self-pity, Conley conveys the serious toll that her decision to resign took on her personal as well as her professional life. By going public, she touched off a complex chain of events that ultimately resulted in the man in question not being appointed chairman of her department. Conley was able to return to Stanford and the job she loved. But in the process, she lost her research laboratory.
“Walking Out on the Boys” certainly leaves the impression that there is still a long way to go. Despite a large increase in the number of women doctors in the years since Conley embarked on her career, sexist attitudes, as she discovered, had not much diminished from 1961 to 1991.
Nor is medicine the only field thus afflicted: “Unfortunately,” she observes, “as a country we have not demanded high ethical and moral standards for our elected leadership let alone those chosen within the academic arena.”
And, indeed, despite a steady stream of high-profile cases, torrents of media coverage and scads of programs designed to inculcate political correctness, sexism is alive and well in countless areas of American life.
