Navigating the Historical and Present Challenges of Women in Medicine

Women have played pivotal roles in medicine, however there are many obstacles they face. From battling society's judgment to overcoming biases, the challenges women encounter in medicine are entrenched and different. After all, medicine has historically always been a male-dominated field. Let’s dive into the historical and current challenges women face in healthcare.

Historical Challenges

1. Barriers on education

           Women have faced many barriers in education. Since medicine has been a male dominated field, there were little to no spaces in medical schools for women. If a woman was even accepted to the school, there would be prejudices and misconceptions of them. Take Elizabeth Blackwell as an example. She was accepted into medicine school after 150 men thought her application was a joke. But, she evolved to help women get more opportunities in healthcare.

1. Little to no recognition of Women

Women in medicine have little to no recognition. Even if a woman made a large impact in the medicine field, it was largely attributed to male colleagues.

1. Discrimination

If a woman were to be accepted into a job relating to medicine, the job would have unequal pay. Also, women would likely not be able to apply for large roles.

Current Challenges

1. Lack of representation in Medicine subjects

A current challenge for many women is lack of representation in a certain field of medicine. These fields include surgery and cardiology. These fields tend to be male dominated as well.

1. Biases and Disparities

Although we are in a generation where all are equal, there are disparities like lower pay than males and lower opportunities for large roles. Although medicine has highly evolved in terms of accessibility, even older problems like little to no recognition in healthcare jobs still exist in the industry still.

1. Work-Life Balance

It’s hard for women to balance their careers with work, especially in medicine or healthcare. It can be challenging for women because of the long hours and irregular schedules often required in healthcare professions.

Women have worked very hard to battle hardships, discrimination, and biases in healthcare with perseverance since the 1800s. Although medicine has greatly evolved over the decades, there is still room for improvement to achieve gender equality in healthcare. Acknowledging these historical and present biases can help us work together to create a future where women can be valued, respected, and appreciated.

Decoding AI: Pros VS Cons

Introduction

In today’s world, our eyes remain glued to the screens; whether it be for recreation or for our jobs. Artificial Intelligence, or abbreviated to “AI”, has put a significant impact on the things we interact with everyday, mainly being technology. By 2023, AI itself had built a technological industry worth $142.3 billion (Statista, 2023). AI has essentially rewritten many aspects of our lives, from healthcare to finance, redefining several industries and enhancing technology.

However, these advances created by AI have been reasonably questioned by many regarding its potential change on society, economy, politics, and much more. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to understand the truth of AI by considering its remarkable pros and ugly disadvantages.

The following blog will attempt to display the vivid benefits and impacts of AI in this world and the cons of this multi-million dollar industry. 

What is AI?

Before we go over the pros and cons of AI, we should know a bit about what it is before we make an opinion regarding it. Artificial Intelligence refers to the development of technological systems able to do tasks that usually require human skills and intelligence. After much development, forms of AI include self-driving cars, virtual assistants, and a lot more. 

Why are the Pros and Cons important?

EmpowerHer’s main goal is to not only help women pave their paths in careers like business, medicine, and AI but also to help them find what they don’t necessarily thrive in or enjoy. If you are looking to find a job relating to AI, you should look at the pros and cons so you can get a glimpse of what to expect in the job. It may even change your choice in career. You could be interested in medicine, but look through the pros and cons and decide that AI would suit you more. But for a more practical and detailed approach to careers like finance, AI, and medicine, be sure to attend EmpowerHer’s events to experience live workshops and hands-on-activities. Overall, looking at the pros and cons of something you are interested in can change your perspective on the subject and possibly change your career choice. 

Benefits of AI & The job Itself

AI is a broad subject, meaning there are also several jobs using it. From healthcare to environmental conservation. Nearly every single job in this generation uses a form of AI. Let’s go over a short list of the main pros of AI and jobs relating to it!

1. Efficiency & Accuracy: AI can automate repetitive tasks in seconds, allowing humans to not only save time but also get a more efficient answer. Leading me to my next point, Accuracy. AI technology can perform pretty complex calculations and answer perplexing questions with a high degree of accuracy. This can possibly leave our next generations in good hands, capable of wasting much less time compared to us when decision-making and figuring things out. 

1. Cost Saving & Personalization: Since AI is efficient and can automate human tasks, AI can easily help homeowners, businesses, educational institutes, and other organizations or technologies with income and cost saving. An example is that businesses can increase profitability while reducing operational costs.

1. Increased Safety: AI can help us monitor critical systems like medical systems, transportation, and the military (to name a few). Because AI can monitor these systems, it can also proactively heal any safety issues without human intervention. An example could be when someone is hacking a safety system, AI could quickly detect this and take steps to protect the system and potentially prevent this from happening in the future.

Pros of Jobs Relating to AI

This field will grow in the future as companies are investing in platforms like ChatGPT and Meta AI. There could possibly be a huge demand for these jobs in the future

Cons of AI & Jobs Relating to it

Although AI may be accurate at times, over 60% of Americans who use AI question it and decide whether to trust it or not. Also, about 6% of AI’s calculations end up with the wrong answer. Although this is a low percentage, we can’t necessarily depend on AI fully (for now!) Below, find few of the many cons of AI!

 Software Bugs:

Although AI is trusted, software bugs can and will occur frequently. You could want to perform the simplest procedure but still go through bugs. If you are using AI for a critical decision and a software bug occurs, there can be devastating effects.

Take over the world & Misuses:

This is a frequent topic— but could AI take over the world? The answer could be yes. Now that AI is basically accessible to all, it could be misused by the wrong people. They could take over the important or all of the systems in the world with the help of AI and technically do whatever they’d like. Other than taking over the world, people can use AI to do things against others, spread fake news, and more.

Take over Jobs:

You may hear your parents or colleagues talking about different companies like Facebook or Google laying-off thousands of employees. One of the reasons for this is AI. It’s not only electronic/online companies; It is even jobs in education. AI can easily create multiple robot teachers, removing jobs of teachers. See, companies are starting to realize that they don’t need people working for a certain position because AI can be just as smart as any human and can perform the same tasks of the role, maybe even better than humans. All these people getting unemployed are adding up to millions due to a single technology network; Artificial Intelligence.

Overview

So, there are many positive and negative impacts of AI on people currently and in the future. We can’t either control or anticipate where we will lead AI (or where AI could lead us). The only thing we can do is wait.

Even if you're confused about AI or your career— don’t worry! Attend EmpowerHer’s workshops including hands-on-activities, events, and more to learn more about careers and help other women pursue their careers as well.