[Del Mundo] humorously relates that when she arrived in Boston and went to the dormitory assigned her in a letter from the director of the hospital housing, much to her surprise she found herself in a men's dorm. Unknowingly the Harvard officials had admitted a female to their all-male student body. But because her record was so strong the head of the pediatrics department saw no reason not to accept her. Thus, upsetting Harvard tradition, she became the first Philippine woman and the only female at the time to be enrolled at the Harvard Medical School.

Raut became a doctor when modern medicine was in its infancy, which is noteworthy. Even in Britain, which established the first medical college for women in 1874, there weren't many women practising doctors at the time. Her life in India was certainly unusual, as women were mostly confined to the home at the time, which makes her achievements all the more striking.

Referrals dropped by 54 percent after a patient died at the hands of a female surgeon, but when it was a male surgeon whose patient died, there was only a small stagnation in the referrals the surgeon received from the doctor. What’s more, a good patient outcome (i.e., an unanticipated survival) led doctors to become more optimistic about a male surgeon’s ability, again using referral volumes after a surgery as the proxy for the doctors’ views of the surgeons’ talent. The same wasn’t true for female doctors.

“We have to be aware that we are underrepresenting women,” she says. “When we look for sources, we have to pay more attention to the women whose names are on the studies.”

“I see no possible reason why young women, unless they are absolutely needed in the domestic circle,—even then, self-reliance should be taught them,—should not be trained to some healthful remunerative employment,” Harriot opined. Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/woman-who-paved-way-female-physicians-america-180967104/#ls74qjMQIw7ZceEC.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

“Most universities or research organizations are on board to try to increase the number of women, and they think that that’s somehow going to solve all the problems,” Londa Schiebinger, one of Nielsen’s co-authors and his former mentor at Stanford, said. “But universities typically don’t understand how to fix the knowledge aspect. And I think that’s what’s so important about our study: it shows a link between the participation issue, the diversity on teams, and excellent knowledge outcomes.”

Too often, educators seemed to operate based on stereotypes and unwarranted assumptions. “The challenge with being a little brown girl is that when you tell people it’s your aspiration to be a doctor, they don’t believe you can do it,” one physician told us. “They try to push you into nursing or something else where they have seen someone like you.”

“Honor walls are commonplace in many higher learning institutions,” says Dr. Silver. “Unfortunately, what they commonly reinforce are an image of the medical profession as a bastion of male dominance. This, at a time when children’s STEM learning environments actively focus on dispelling stereotypes and women make up a significant proportion of doctors in America.” Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3529877#ixzz4wr2eCMPv

That ECT is more commonly used among women and older individuals was of concern, said Read. “Nobody talks about it, or tries to explain it, or wonders why that might be,” he said, stressing that ECT does not tackle the social issues behind why more women than men appear to have depression.

The difficulty of having kids during residency appears to be discouraging women from becoming surgeons, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston recently found in a survey of 347 active surgeons who had been pregnant during their residencies in the last decade. Just under half the surgeons surveyed said they considered quitting their residencies during pregnancy. About a third said they wouldn’t recommend that women in medical school become surgeons.

Health + Hospitals Corporation assistant vice president Al Garofalo polled several mostly male colleagues about who they would sleep with during a 2015 holiday party, according to sworn testimony given by a former IT director for HHC, James Gomez. The deposition was taken as part of a sexual harassment lawsuit being brought against the agency.

In the latest report, it turns out that the patients of female surgeons tend to have lower death rates, fewer complications and lower readmissions to the hospital a month after their procedure, compared to the patients of male surgeons.