Just 7% of surgical consultants in Ireland are female. However, almost 50% of trainees are female.
In 2017, RCSI published a comprehensive report 'PROGRESS: Promoting Gender Equality in Surgery', which highlighted the scale of the gender imbalance problem and sought to make meaningful recommendations to ensure surgery as a profession is an attractive career for both men and women.
As part of the many conversations that followed the publication of the report, in November 2017, we invited two RCSI graduates, Ms Houriya Kazim FRCSI (Class of 1988) and Dr Adanna Steinacker (Class of 2015), back to RCSI to share their experiences and thoughts on how to address the imbalance and their hopes for the future. You can watch their full discussion below.
Watch Houriya Kazim andAdanna Steinacker talk about being a woman in medicine and surgery
Since 2017, RCSI has made some progress in addressing the issues raised in the report and discussed by Ms Kazim and Dr Steinacker. In 2018, we hosted the Association of Women in Surgery (AWS) group from the American College of Surgeons; and established the PROGRESS Women in Surgery Fellowship, supported by Johnson & Johnson, in 2019 – with the first recipient of the fellowship awarded early this year.
Read the report on our progress here.
RCSI is committed to achieving a better and more sustainable future through the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
