What is a voice? How do we utilize that voice to better the society we live in? These are questions I have struggled with since an early age and am still defining to this day. My Bachelor’s in Women’s Studies from UF was instrumental in helping me discover my voice and learn how to use it in both personal and professional settings.
I come from a large family in a small village in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where the expectations for a “good Bengali woman” are to obey your parents, live by the dictates of your religion and community, marry well, and have children. Family is central to our identity, and out of respect for our family, we learn to live within the expected roles of a “good woman.” My parents are illiterate and poor, and when we moved to America as first-generation immigrants, the focus in our house was on survival: how to extend our minimum-wage paychecks to meet our immediate needs for food and shelter. There was no space to think beyond survival: topics such as gender roles and stereotypes, class privileges, and power dynamics were lived roles we experienced but were not topics we discussed. Instead, I encountered these topics in high school while reading books such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Beloved. Ideas about gender roles and power dynamics in these books resonated with me and made me question my understanding of the world and my place in it.
I joined the Women’s Studies program not only as an internal revolt to the expected role of a good woman but also to help me gain a voice to help others. When I entered the US school system, I spoke no English: I spent my days in silence, becoming a quiet, reserved person who often did not ask questions and lingered in the background. Growing up in a world where I saw a woman’s role as very restrictive, I wanted to cultivate a strong voice that could potentially help others, especially other women in my community. Classes such as Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Women, Transnational Feminism, Gender and Development, and Global Violence Against Women helped me understand concepts such as gender roles and stereotypes, sexuality, inequity, bias, class privilege, and power dynamics. They helped me recognize that imbalances of power affect not only women but all minority groups, not only in America but also globally. These courses helped me cultivate a language I could use to develop the agency to help change the world around me.
My Women’s Studies major helped steer me directly toward a career in medicine. Although I always had a strong desire to help others, as a child, I never wanted to be a physician. In Bengali culture, physicians are placed on pedestals and seen as smart and influential authority figures; I have to admit I never thought I could be one myself! How can a quiet, compliant woman be a strong, powerful voice, especially in a position of authority? However, through my Women’s Studies courses, I saw myself as a person with the agency who could help others by going beyond my expected role. Not only that, but my internship in Bangladesh during my senior year led to my thesis paper exploring the role of gender and poverty in healthcare, especially within the framework of structural violence experienced by minority populations. The concepts of structural violence (the idea that the very structure/infrastructure of society creates power dynamics to benefit one group of people over another) and the role of poverty in health fundamentally changed the way I view our healthcare system. For example, everything within the US healthcare system is geared towards people who can read and write. Something as simple as filling out paperwork before a doctor’s visit is a struggle for illiterate patients like my parents. This creates an invisible barrier for patients; they will forgo healthcare or be unable to give accurate answers because they cannot overcome the expectation of literacy in our healthcare system.
Poverty also has devastating impacts on people’s ability to access healthcare. For example, I recently had a liver transplant patient who was non-compliant with her immunosuppressive medications, which led to her developing acute rejection of her transplanted liver. She became noncompliant because she had lost her insurance and could no longer afford her medications. Even in healthcare, especially in healthcare, the poor suffer, and we must use our agentic voice as physicians to help them access care. This patient did not know to whom to turn to regain her health insurance. However, the transplant team worked with her to find services that would help her cover her medications, at least until she could afford new health insurance. Although this may seem far removed from the topics of Women’s Studies, at the root of the problem is poverty and inequality of access to health care. It is important to understand the underlying reason my patient developed acute rejection to help remedy the problem.
Finally, just recently, I was struck again by the prominent role gender plays in medicine. During a panel discussion on the dos and don’ts of job interviews at a nationally renowned medical center, the Chair of the Pathology department called on all of the female attendees to pay attention to how they respond to job postings. She stated that in her many years of hiring staff Pathologists, she noticed that female physicians often do not apply for jobs in which they do not meet all the qualifications on the job postings, unlike their male counterparts, thereby limiting their job options even before the application process starts. A gender gap also exists in male and female physician compensation, with female physicians being paid less than their male colleagues with similar levels of education and experience. Female physicians are also 2.6 times more likely to participate in additional, unpaid at-home work than men. This leads to higher rates of burnout in female physicians, causing them to work part-time or even leave medicine altogether.
I would not be the person or the physician I am today if I hadn’t done my Women’s Studies major at UF. After I finished my BA, I left home to travel extensively to complete a Master’s of Science in Biomedical Sciences, Doctor of Medicine (MD), a residency in Pathology, a fellowship in Cytopathology, and am now completing a fellowship in Gastrointestinal/Liver Pathology. All of my accomplishments are framed within the concepts I learned during my time at UF, because concepts such as gender roles and gender stereotypes, structural violence, and economic inequalities permeate all aspects of our lives. I am forever thankful that I was introduced to these concepts at the beginning of my career, early in my own personal growth. I hope to continue to use the concepts I learned to not only use my voice to create agency for myself but also to understand and reframe our healthcare system using those concepts to be a voice of agency for my patients.