Female doctors should form personal relationships with senior role models, researchers say

Female doctors must be given opportunities to develop close personal relationships with senior colleagues who can act as role models, Exeter University researchers have argued.

A study carried out by Kim Peters and Michelle Ryan from the university, in partnership with the Medical Women’s Federation, examined whether female doctors benefited from having role models. The researchers found that female doctors benefited from role models with whom they had formed close personal relationships. However, other, more standard, interventions designed to support women in their careers, such as increasing the visibility of successful women, did not help.

Commenting on their findings in a report by the Medical Women’s Federation, Peters and Ryan said, “The role models who make a substantial difference to women are the role models who are part of their daily lives: mothers, relatives, colleagues, supervisors, and teachers. It is those individuals who are willing to take the time to nurture female medics that women identify as most effective—not the distant and impersonal symbols of success.”1

The researchers recommended that opportunities be provided to female doctors, especially junior doctors, to “interact with a range of more senior male and female individuals.” They said that such opportunities were important to give women the ability to develop personal relationships with role models.

At a meeting of the federation meeting, the researchers interviewed 24 women (10 medical students, six specialty trainees, and eight consultants) about their attitudes towards role models. The women said that they looked for three main functions in role models: to inspire, to boost confidence, and to give practical support.

Most of the women named their role model as someone who they knew well and with whom they had much contact. Many of the interviewees named female role models; and the researchers said, “There was general agreement that female role models may be important when it came to issues related to parenthood and work-life balance or in specialties (like surgery) that are male dominated.” However, overall the sex of the role model was “unimportant,” they argued.

The researchers also sent a short questionnaire to 88 members of the Medical Women’s Federation asking about their occupational experiences. They found that the more role models there were for women in a particular field, the more likely women were to believe that they fitted into that field.

The research also found that the more role models women had, the more likely they were to say that many different kinds of people could succeed in their career path. “In general, respondents who responded more favourably to the role model measures also expressed higher perceptions of occupational fit, career ambition, and occupational heterogeneity,” the researchers wrote.