Feminists and followers of identity politics are rejoicing this week over the news that after centuries of discrimination against them, women doctors at last outnumber their male colleagues in the UK. Please forgive me if I don’t join the celebrations.
Before I go an inch further, I can’t stress too strongly that I have the greatest admiration for women doctors, who undeniably include some of the most hard-working, skilful and dedicated practitioners of their profession.
I would go further and say that although I try to avoid seeing doctors of either sex in their professional capacity, except on the rare occasions when Mrs U frog-marches me to the surgery, I marginally prefer to be seen and treated by a woman.
The fact is that I feel a little less awkward about stripping off and being manhandled by a female (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms). Apparently, this makes me slightly unusual among my sex, less than a third of whom tell pollsters they share my preference.
In my very limited experience, women also tend to be gentler and less brusque than men – although no less strict about ticking me off for my smoking and drinking habits. Perhaps it’s just that I take tickings-off from women more in my stride, since I’m so used to them at home.
But I can postpone the point of this column no longer. So I must strap on my tin hat, poke my head above the parapet of the culture wars and forge ahead. Though I know I risk incurring the wrath of a very sizeable chunk of the medical profession, some things just have to be said.
So here goes: to put it bluntly, all the figures I’ve seen suggest that compared with women, male physicians and surgeons tend to give us considerably more in return for the six-figure sum it costs to train a doctor.
Indeed, a study by the British Journal of General Practice found that between 1998 and 2020, women GPs on average worked 10.99 hours per week fewer than men. In hospitals, the disparity was smaller, but again men worked more hours than women – 6.12 more, to be precise, at an average of 49.3 hours per week, while women worked 43.18.
A study by the British Journal of General Practice found that between 1998 and 2020, women GPs on average worked 10.99 hours per week fewer than men
Multiply those figures by the number of women doctors – 164,400 at the end of last week, as against 164,195 men – and you’ll see that women cumulatively put in tens of millions of hours fewer than their male colleagues every year.
And that disparity is set to grow even greater as the years go by, since no fewer than six in every ten of the 2023 intake at medical schools were female.
Meanwhile, NHS waiting lists stretch from here to Timbuktu. Add lengthening lifespans and ever more expensive treatments to the pressure of clearing the backlog, and it’s no wonder that health trusts’ budgets are stretched to breaking point.
Heaven knows, I’m not accusing women of laziness, since the explanation of their shorter total working time is obvious: they not only give birth to babies, while men don’t, but most mothers still shoulder much more responsibility for childcare than fathers.
What with the school run and the rest of it, this puts tremendous demands on them, which is why so many women doctors, in particular, choose to work only part-time.
Of course, this is made easier for them than for many couples by their generous pay, and the fact that doctors tend to hook up with partners in the same income bracket.
It is also worth mentioning that women still tend to retire earlier than men, despite the equalising of the state pension age. Again, lavish work pensions make this a more viable proposition for doctors than for most employees of the private sector.
While Keir Starmer mutters about the urgent need for growth, he lets his deputy Angela Rayner make it easier for workers to strike and sue their employers, writes Tom Utley
As for the growing proportion of women who are undergoing training, this is easily explained by the fact that girls now tend to do better than boys at A-level, and to perform better in interviews for places at medical school.
So, no, it is absolutely no part of my intention to disparage women doctors – and still less to suggest that by signing up to the NHS, they should forgo their right to have babies.
Indeed, if this were a perfect world, and money were no object to the NHS, I would be cheering as loudly as any militant feminist over the latest figures. Equality at last!
But let’s face it, this is a very imperfect world in which, thanks to the reckless unpredictability of the guy in the White House – and the imperial ambitions of tyrants in the Kremlin and elsewhere – Britain suddenly finds itself needing vast sums of money for defence. With the nation’s debt already not far short of £3trillion – 100 per cent of our annual economic output – this means making huge savings and efficiencies in public spending wherever they can be found.
Yet apart from pulling solemn, statesmanlike faces, blustering a bit and promising to increase the defence budget (by not nearly enough to deter aggression, and not before yet another review, naturally), Sir Keir Starmer appears to be carrying on as if nothing alarming has happened in the world.
So it is that while he mutters about the urgent need for growth, he lets his deputy Angela Rayner make it easier for workers to strike and sue their employers, while allowing Ed Miliband to press on with outlawing cheap energy, in his national-suicide mission to enforce net zero.
At the same time, he forges ahead with his baffling plan to pay China’s friend, Mauritius, an eye-watering sum for accepting our gift of the strategically important Chagos Islands.
As for standing up for our fighting men, he may utter fine words, and pose for the cameras in combat fatigues, but he has shown himself as willing as ever to let his fellow human rights lawyers hound them through the courts, decades on, for the crime of obeying orders.
Meanwhile, the holy trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion continue to take precedence over every consideration of the nation’s most pressing needs, even at this time of enormous global peril.
Yes, I realise it’s foolhardy of me to risk turning women doctors against me at my time of life (I’m 71), when the likelihood of my needing their tender services grows greater with every passing month.
But I really can’t share the feminists’ delight over this week’s news, when the growing proportion of women in the medical profession seems only to promise an increasingly inefficient NHS.
This might be all very well in affluent times, if the health service had more cash than it knew how to spend. But at a time of terrifying debt, when there’s a real possibility that we may find ourselves caught up in a major war, and unable to defend ourselves? I don’t think so.
Describing the figures as a ‘significant milestone’, General Medical Council chairman Professor Dame Carrie MacEwen said: ‘The demographics of the medical workforce are rapidly changing, and that diversity will benefit patients.’
Again, I plead for forgiveness. But if diversity means fewer full-time doctors in the NHS, isn’t the opposite true?
