Gender sensitivity a sensitive issue
CMAJ 1997;157:640
Re: "Gender sensitivity in medical curricula" (CMAJ 1997;156:1297-1300 [full text / résumé]) by Barbara Zelek and associates
See response from: S. Phillips
I read the article by Zelek and colleagues with what I felt was genuine sensitivity. I have been educating young women and men to become physicians for the past 30 years and have been conscious for most of that time of the problems facing both sexes. I do not believe the problem to be as complex as the authors suggest. It is real but it is also simple: it is a matter of choosing the right words. In health care we are notorious for creating new words and giving old ones new meanings. A lot of our problems would be solved if instead of creating new words we made use of well-established ones. The article asks us to be sensitive to "genderizing" medical curricula. Gender is defined in this paper as "both the real relations between the sexes and the cultural renderings of those relations." I do not agree. The word gender refers to a grammatical classification of objects roughly corresponding to the two sexes and sexlessness (for example, masculine, feminine, neuter). Ships are a good example: for eons they have been of the feminine gender.
Gender has nothing to do with real relations between the sexes or their cultural renderings. Two simple words are enough to define this: respect and equality. And what this requires is the right attitude. The creation of new words and the misunderstandings of old ones are not the answer.
Lawrence J. Clein, MB
Professor
Division of Neurosurgery
Royal University Hospital
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Sask.
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