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Lack of women cardiologists might lower standards
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    Women are rejecting cardiology as a career because of long working hours, lack of flexible training and part time consultant posts, and an absence of role models.

    If more women are not attracted to the discipline, standards may fall, warns a report from a working group of the British Cardiac Society. The report makes a series of recommendations and promises tough action on any cases of sexism.

    The working group warns that sexist attitudes will not be tolerated. The report quotes one female doctor as saying, "I was told (by a senior consultant) as an SHO ... not to do cardiology because I was a girl." The group states: "If a complaint against a member is substantiated, the British Cardiac Society will not hesitate in reviewing the membership of the offender" ( Heart 2005;91: 283-9).

    The report adds: "The failure of cardiology to attract women when the gender ratio of medical undergraduates is approximately balanced indicates that a substantial proportion of the talent pool is being lost to other specialties. If this is not corrected it will prove increasingly difficult to maintain high standards of cardiological practice and research in this country."

    The report says that women now make up 59% of medical school applicants and that the quality of female applicants to all specialist registrar posts seems to be better than that of their male peers. But in cardiology, in 2002, women made up less than 17% of trainees in the specialty and only just over 7% of consultants, figures that have changed little in a decade. At the same time, the number of consultant cardiologists has risen from 381 to 665.

    It was the failure of cardiology to attract women that prompted the British Cardiac Society to establish the working group that compiled the report.

    "Although there is no evidence of discrimination against women in selection for medical school or cardiology specialist registrar rotations, the working group believes that many women are being `turned off' the specialty based on the mismatch between career aspirations of female medical graduates and applications to cardiology SpR (specialist registrar) rotations," says the report.(Roger Dobson)