Confronting Gender Issues—Passionate Persuasion or a Deluge of Data?

The last few months have been filled with new audiences for speech making about gender discrimination in healthcare. In December, when I finished my speech at a small scientific meeting of about 150 members and guests of the Society for Ear, Nose and Throat Advances in Children, I asked my good friend and mentor, Bob Ruben, what he thought about my speech.

He told me to get the data, and then to tell the story with less passion. I knew he told my friend Nina that I would be very tired after the speech, and so I should not have been surprised at his recommendation. After thinking it over I became angry. How was it that the speech by the Robert J. Ruben awardee for contributions to research, was given a standing ovation about after his very passionate speech about his love for hearing and for sound and for the ear and for the team he brought together to building a center of excellence? Why was his passion celebrated and mine was not?

Simple. His was safe. It didn’t challenge anyone to think that they could have a part in discrimination. It didn’t challenge anyone to change their world. They could celebrate his role in change and comfortable sit and remind themselves that they, too, had their scientific passion.

I, on the other hand, had challenged everyone to think about something that they could do something about, but haven’t and likely won’t. So my passion was wasted and only took a toll on me.

We have piles of “the data.” It has been nearly half a century since the problem was brought back into the public discourse. After the first wave of feminism which began shortly after the Civil War and ended with woman’s suffrage, women were lulled into the belief that the vote would lead us to equality. It didn’t.

So is passion more or less helpful when persuading someone of a moral/ethical imperative that has enormous practical implications? Clearly not for everyone, even a man who is one of the most gender neutral people I know.

We have spent the last 50 years studying the situation. We have studied the problem and it is ours. We have the data. What we don’t have is the collective will to bring about change. We choose not to act. Or if we do act, we do so within a circumscribed framework that has been built to maintain the status quo. Not to challenge it and reform it or overhaul it or take it down.

Is it the message or the messenger? Or maybe the message is old, (like the messenger) and gender discrimination is not worthy of discussion. The time for talk is over. The passion and data need to be re-focused into action. Easy to say, hard to realize.

So where does that leave me, the advocate for the next generation. There cannot be a next generation that needs an advocate. It’s time to make it happen. Now.