Honorary woman

More than half the UK medical graduates starting their first jobs this week are women. They'll say: so what? More than half the babies born are girls. It's no big deal.

Historically, though, it is. After being excluded from medicine for 500 years, women will soon form the majority. The change is fastest in my specialty, where 74% of UK career senior house officers are women. An American journal recently asked, under a picture of a woolly mammoth and a man in a white coat: “Are male ob/gyns headed for extinction?”

Silly question. Of course we are. Hardly any male students now consider a career in obstetrics and gynaecology. Last week on our medical campus I noticed a summer school full of male postgraduates—aspiring surgeons, of course. To an obstetrician this was an unfamiliar sight.

How do you face extinction with dignity? We fiftysomething obstetricians started our careers inan era of small quotas of female students, when sexism and schoolboy jokes were common (though by no means universal) among our teachers. We understand the anger of contemporaries who had to fightold fashioned prejudice, or who gave up the battle.

But we've been caught in the crossfire for 20 years now. The backlash against male obstetricians has taken the form, not of frontal assault, but of surreptitious jokes. Newsletters of maternityconsumer groups peddle the image of uncaring male consultants. Radical midwives brief politicians against us. And the new generation of women obstetricians cannot resist the odd jibe.

All we can do is join in with humorous self deprecation. Twenty years of apologising, however, is enough. We're leaving. In 2001 the average retirement age of obstetricians was 57. They gave all sorts of excuses, including the ageism endemic in the NHS, but I think they would have stayed ifthey felt appreciated.

It's time for the victors in medicine's battle of the sexes to show some magnanimity. For me, the process started last month when a group of distinguished female colleagues made me an Honorary Woman. No surgery or hormones, you understand, and no paperwork—only a feeling of liberation. Enough to write this article, at least. I shall wait a few more years before setting up the Medical Men's Federation, dedicated to promoting the interests of the new minority.