My Wife Is A 1950s Man

During a recent panel discussion regarding gender disparity amongst physicians, an accomplished neurosurgeon offered an explanation for why women remain underrepresented in leadership positions. Women, he suggested, may simply be more nurturing and caring. More relationship-oriented. More likely to prioritize caring for others over pursuing authority.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard this argument a number of times before. Usually the response is to challenge the premise. Are women actually more nurturing? Are these innate differences or societal expectations? Those are worthwhile questions.

But listening to the discourse, I found myself thinking about my wife, Frances Mei Hardin. Because none of the usual explanations apply to her. Frances Mei has what can only be described as the personality and responsibilities of a successful 1950s professional man. 

We don’t have children, so there’s no child-bearing or child-rearing. She does not cook. She does not clean. She is not the primary caretaker for our dog or cat. She is not the household manager. She is not the person doing laundry, replacing air filters, scheduling maintenance, or carrying the thousand tiny administrative burdens required to make a household function. She does not shop for groceries. I do all of those tasks, while working full time as well. 

This is not a complaint. It’s simply an observation. 

Many discussions about gender disparities in medicine focus on the "second shift" phenomenon: the unpaid labor women perform after returning home from work. Childcare. Housework. Emotional labor. Management of family affairs. Those burdens are real, and they matter. But Frances Mei largely doesn't have them.

If we are searching for a physician who has been freed from many of the traditional expectations placed upon women, she is a remarkably clean test case. And yet the outcomes are not what the traditional narrative, that this is a meritocracy, would predict.

The promise implicit in many discussions about professional advancement is straightforward: remove the domestic burdens and women will advance the same way men have historically advanced. Frances Mei removed those barriers, yet I still saw her encounter many of the same issues as her female surgeon peers at the hospital. The same need to establish credibility in situations where comparable men (or frankly, less competent men) receive it automatically.

The explanation could not be that she consistently had to leave early to pick the kids up from school. There were no kids. The explanation could not be that she was not available at all hours due to household obligations. They weren’t there.

What if the problem is not simply what women are doing? What if the problem is also how institutions perceive women, regardless of what they do?

I doubt I’m breaking any news to women reading this, and it’s not that I just learned this last week. But the irony is that Frances Mei has succeeded precisely because she has ignored many of the expectations traditionally attached to womanhood. She built a life optimized around her work, her ideas, and her ambitions, and it still wasn’t enough for the traditional institution of healthcare. 

When a man devotes himself almost entirely to his profession, society often interprets this as dedication. When a woman does the same thing, society often treats it as a deviation requiring explanation. “Her family must miss her at home.” “Her husband can’t be happy about that.” Surely there’s a cost. 

But in Frances Mei’s case, there isn’t a cost. I am happy to take on the responsibilities previous generations would have assigned to a wife because it would be absurd not to. I see how exceptionally capable Frances Mei is. Together, we've made a conscious decision to direct as much of her time and energy as possible toward creating, building, writing, and leading.

I’m not making some sort of noble sacrifice - partnerships work best when they are organized around reality rather than tradition. And I don’t see the current model of clinical medicine doing that for women. Neither did Frances Mei. So she left, because her talents should not be wasted in a system that doesn’t fully value her. She is incredibly smart, charismatic, has incredible attention to detail, and patients loved her. We live in a fairly small town, and patients regularly approached her in public to say how thankful they were for taking care of them or their family members. Yet it became clear, fairly early on, that medicine itself would never love her back.

The reality is that Frances Mei has an unusual capacity to create things that matter. She is not afraid of hard work - if anything, she is working much more now that she has left the hospital. I pretty regularly have to pry the laptop from her hands so we can go to sleep. 

What changed wasn’t her ambition. It was where she chose to direct it. 

For years, medicine has approached the challenges facing women physicians as though the solution is helping women fit more comfortably into a system designed around assumptions that no longer make sense. More mentorship. More flexibility. Better policies. More leadership training.

Those are all great, but at some point, it becomes worth asking a different question. 

What if the system needs to adapt to women? 

What if some of the most talented physicians are leaving not because they lack resilience, ambition, or commitment, but because they can clearly see that their talents are more valuable elsewhere? That even if the barriers were removed, they would still encounter an institution that responds to and evaluates them differently than their male counterparts. 

Frances Mei was not splitting her time between the hospital and a “second shift” at home. Yet the friction remained. So what is the answer? Will medicine as it exists now ever offer women the same assumptions, opportunities, and grace that it has traditionally afforded men? I think we all know the answer to that…

I’m sure there are more women like her than most people realize. Women who might be done waiting for someone to make room for them at the table.

The lesson is not that every woman needs to become a 1950s man to succeed. It’s that women should not feel obligated to become anything at all. They don’t need to adapt to a system that wasn’t built for them. 

The old model is not working particularly well, really for anyone at this point, and it seems remarkably resistant to change. So maybe it’s time to stop negotiating with it.