A Letter to Shirlene Obuobi About Article on the Harassment of Female Doctors
What About Harassment of Male Doctors?
Dear Dr. Obuobi,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent article in The Washington Post, Rude comments and bottom slaps: The things female doctors put up with, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
As a short introduction, I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.1
But my pride in the Post turned to quiet outrage in 2018 after the paper published two undeniably biased articles: Why can't we hate men? and Amber Heard’s shameful op-ed.2
Since then, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this gender bias.
Your article is, unfortunately, another example of this bias.
Why is it gender biased?
Because the article only describes the problems faced by female doctors, with absolutely no mention of the same, or even worse problems faced by male doctors, for example false accusations made by female patients.
Before I continue, let me be clear: I have no doubt that female doctors sometimes do face harassment and gender-based insults. I’ve had exemplary female doctors and I’ve always appreciated their dedication and caring commitment, so I am bothered that both male and female doctors are sometimes mistreated by a very small minority of offenders, both male and female.
However, as they say, there are always two sides to every story, and you’ve only told the female side.
Let’s start with your article’s first sentence, “When my co-resident went on maternity leave, my colleagues turned on her.”
Although it’s implied that these colleagues were male, I have a sneaking suspicion that you left out the complainers’ gender because many of them were female. It’s not uncommon for women to be the worst perpetrators of “anti-Mom bias”. NY Times columnist Katherine Goldstein opened her 2018 article The Open Secret of Anti-Mom Bias at Work with this eye-opener:
“Last fall, I was in a meeting with a leader in women’s health, discussing re-entry-to-work programs for new mothers when, out of the blue, she began complaining about a former employee. This employee on their small team had gotten pregnant, the woman said — and it was a problem: “She was way too focused on her pregnancy. It was distracting her. I didn’t think she was going to be committed enough to the job, so I had to let her go.” I looked at her, stunned. This woman — a mother herself — who worked on a range on initiatives to support women was openly and casually admitting to illegal discrimination, against another mother.”
With friends like these, who needs enemies, right?
Next your article only gives examples of female doctors who were sexually harassed, but a simple Google search easily reveals that male doctors are also harassed, both by other physicians and patients. Some examples:
2018 report reveals how many male physicians are sexually harassed
The Experience of Male Physicians with Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment: a Qualitative Study
Survey: More than 1 in 4 doctors sexually harassed by patients (“Not surprisingly, more women doctors (19%) have been sexually harassed by patients, but male physicians (16%) get their share of unwanted attention from patients.”)
And your article doesn’t discuss times when female doctors are insensitive harassers themselves. The book The Myth of Male Power (“recommended reading for feminists everywhere!”) describes one such female uber-harasser, Dr. Frances Conley, the first woman to pursue a surgical internship at Stanford Hospital, who in 1991 resigned to protest a “sexist” environment.
But sexism at Stanford was a two-way street and for years Dr. Conley was driving down the middle, running over her male colleagues:
“Frances Conley’s colleagues report that it was ‘standard Fran’ for her to joke about the evils of male testosterone and to threaten to castrate the men— to ‘cut off’ their ‘left one.’ That she would refer to her male patients as ‘Mr. This’ and ‘Mr. That.’ When she instructed a male resident to start surgery on a man, she’d yell, ‘Roto-Rooter— your standard plumbing job.’ She would tell male residents she was supervising they had gained weight; if they dared protest, she’d respond, ‘Well, maybe your fat was redistributed between your ears.’ Frances said the men were constantly propositioning her. She later admitted the last proposition was ten years ago. A neurosurgery nurse who worked directly with Fran in the O.R. for fourteen years and reviewed Fran’s complaints, commented, ‘None of this happened. None of it. And I like Fran. She’s been a friend, believe me. But I think she’s gone off the deep end.’”
(In fairness it should be noted that the source of the above quote was a Washington Post article published in 1991, “The Brain Surgeon Who Hit a Nerve: Insensitivity Cuts Both Ways in Stanford’s Operating Room”. It’s available on my Substack.)
But most notably, your article failed entirely to address a type of sexual harassment where the victims are almost entirely male: false accusations of sexual abuse by female patients.
A horrifying example is provided by the case of a New York doctor, Dr. Patrick Griffin, who in 1995 was falsely accused of sexual assault by a female patient and then was tried and convicted by a feminist tag-team prosecutor and judge in an undeniably unjust trial. Briefly, as described in a 2000 Wall Street Journal article, “The Doctor’s Story”.
I highly recommend reading the entire article (available on my Substack) to fully understand the feminist-fueled travesty of justice that Dr. Griffin was subjected to, but guessing that you might not be so inclined, here’s a synopsis:
The accusation was made by Christine Jeffreys, a 43-year-old woman with a checkered financial history who had filed a $2 million lawsuit against her apartment building for evicting her for non-payment of rent.
Claiming the trauma had caused her to suffer stomach problems and emotional anguish, she turned to Dr. Griffin for treatment. Unknown to the doctor, she expected him to testify in her lawsuit to the physical and psychic damage she had suffered, which Griffin wouldn’t do.
A few weeks after Griffin's refusal to support her civil suit she made an appointment for a colonoscopy. On the scheduled date she arrived at Dr. Griffin's office suffering bouts of diarrhea. She later filed charges against the doctor through an administrative court judge who co-signed a retainer agreement that would allow him to receive a portion of any awarded damages.
The absurdity of the accusation made by Ms. Jeffreys was made clear by Griffin’s defense attorney:
“If the accusation were to be believed, Dr. Griffin had decided in the midst of his examination, to place his tongue in a vagina swimming in fecal matter thanks to the condition in which the patient arrived for her colonoscopy. And he had chosen to do this in a thinly curtained room surrounded by staff workers four feet away, a room in which his assistants could enter any moment. Dr. Griffin had, in his career, performed close to 9,000 colonoscopies and endoscopies without ever having shown such proclivities -- and now, the defense argument went, of all the women he might have violated he had decided to sodomize one in this condition?”
In no way should this story minimize the harassment of female doctors, but it should at least put their harassment in a larger perspective, wouldn’t you say?
Dr. Obuobi, in closing, let me say that I don’t object to articles that raise awareness of difficult issues about gender, but may I politely ask that in any of your future articles you include awareness of how these issues may also affect men?
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
My observation was recently confirmed by a February 2023 report that described a 10-Year Suppression of the Truth on Domestic Violence by the Washington Post. The report concludes, “The Coalition to End Domestic Violence calls on the Washington Post, in a timely manner, to run an editorial acknowledging its biased coverage of the domestic abuse issue, and to publish articles that focus on the plight of male victims of domestic violence.”
The Heard op-ed ultimately embarrassed the Post, especially with articles like this one:
“A publication with any semblance of ethics might have asked Depp for comment about the sexual violence claims before running with the allegations — then subsequently spiked the op-ed or sicced its reporters on the case for more fact-finding. But not The Washington Post.
“That paper, which loves to blather in its self-important tone about how “democracy dies in darkness,” didn’t bother to turn the lights in the direction of Heard’s claims. Instead, it gave her a free pass to air her dirty laundry against her ex-husband and consequently enabled her to paint herself both as a victim and a crusader of the Me Too era.”