Sisters and Misters

There is a particular kind of inspiration that comes not from speeches or books or curated highlight reels, but from proximity. From watching someone do quietly, consistently, and with dignity what you have been told — directly or otherwise — is not meant for people like you. That kind of inspiration does not announce itself. It simply stands in front of you and makes the argument with its existence.

I have been lucky enough to encounter that kind of inspiration many times in my career. And a disproportionate number of those moments have come from women in surgery.

I want to be careful here, because this is not a chapter about hierarchy of suffering. The obstacles that come with race in surgery — the way rooms shift when you enter them, the way your competence is perpetually on trial, the way you learn to perform ease when you are anything but — these are real, and I have written about them elsewhere in this collection. They do not need to be minimised or set aside to make this argument.

But neither do they need to be placed in competition with what women in surgery experience.

The honest truth is that I cannot fully know what it is to navigate surgical training as a woman. Just as those who have not experienced discrimination on the grounds of race cannot fully know what that costs. We can read about it. We can believe people when they tell us. We can make space for those accounts. But experience is a closed room, and knowledge from the outside is not the same as knowledge from within.

What I do know — from observation, from friendship, from years spent in theatres and on wards and in the corridors of institutions that were built, literally and architecturally, for someone else — is that women in surgery carry something I do not. They carry it without complaint, often without recognition, and frequently whilst being better than everyone around them.

And that carries its own kind of weight.

Not every woman in surgery has experienced overt bad behaviour. Not every Black surgeon has been discriminated against on the basis of their race. I want to be clear about that, because sweeping statements do no one any favours. The evidence, however — the data, the surveys, the testimony that accumulates year after year — tells us that a significant proportion of both groups have. Enough of a proportion that it is not incidental. Enough that it is structural.

I am not interested in adjudicating whose experience is worse. That is the wrong question. The right question is: what do these experiences cost people, and what does it say about the systems that produce them?

What I can say with certainty is that the women who have shaped my career did not get where they are despite the system. They got where they are in spite of it — which is a different thing entirely. And because they got there the hard way, they know the path. Every turn, every obstacle, every room where the atmosphere changes the moment you enter. They have mapped terrain that no induction programme will ever describe to you. And some of them, in ways I remain grateful for, shared that map with me.

When I first began looking for surgeons who looked like me, I did what most people do now with any question: I searched online. This was early in training, when the shape of the career ahead was still unclear, and I was still working out whether there was a version of it that had space for me.

I found very little. That was its own kind of message.

But in that search I came across a Black female orthopaedic surgeon. I do not think I can fully explain what that meant at the time. To find, in a field so uniformly pale and male, not just a Black surgeon but a Black woman surgeon — someone who had navigated not one invisible threshold but two — felt extraordinary. I read everything I could find about her. I studied how she had built her career. I cannot say that I consciously modelled anything on what I found, but I know that something shifted in my understanding of what was possible.

The idea that it could be done — that someone had already done it — is not nothing. In fact, in surgery, it is almost everything.

Some time later, I met her.

I was not expecting to. These things rarely happen with any ceremony, and this was no different — a conference, a corridor, the ordinary geography of the surgical world contracting to place two people near each other. But I remember feeling, with a clarity I do not often experience, something close to being star-struck.

I have thought about that reaction many times since. I am not generally given to being overwhelmed by people. Surgery teaches you a particular kind of equanimity in the presence of impressive individuals — you encounter them often enough that the awe, if not the respect, tends to diminish. But this was different. This was not about rank or reputation in the conventional sense. It was about what she represented. What her presence in that room confirmed.

Over time, as happens with people you admire from a distance and then encounter up close, she became something more than a symbol. She became a person. And then, in the way that careers and professional lives slowly overlap and interweave, a colleague. Someone known rather than imagined.

She is no less inspiring for being known. If anything, that proximity has deepened what I feel. Because you understand, when you see someone close up over a number of years, what it actually costs them. The smile that stays steady when it has every reason not to. The precision and the patience required to operate in rooms where the assumption of competence is extended to everyone except you.