New York New York

Well this is rather a departure from this diary of remote Australia but I thought I'd share it with you. A trip 3 years in the making and a truly wonderful whirlwind of a week!

Ostensibly I went for this:

The 100th anniversary congress of the Medical Women's International Association.

But you know it's a terribly long way to go and we really needed to be on top of our game for the conference so all ten of us, in our share house in Brooklyn, arrived several days earlier which left us time to have plenty of fun!

We made it to some key tourist destinations:

Mel, Tash and I did an excellent walking food tour around Little Italy and Chinatown. Here is Mel enjoying a New York Pickle!

Tash and I had a lovely morning on a ferry out to Liberty Island and Ellis Island. The engineering behind the statue is amazing and we learned a lot about US immigration which suffers from many of the same political and social complexities as Australian immigration.

I spent a peaceful couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I particularly enjoyed a section on the art of Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylonia. Not that I can pretend to be very knowledgable about it but I can appreciate the beauty!

And there was a nice little exhibition about the moon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

An afternoon at the Chelsea Markets and a wander along the Chelsea High Line turned out to be a real highlight. I bought something little for Mum's birthday, ate some excellent noodles for lunch (he was rolling them out in front of me!) and the High Line gave a beautiful and unique perspective from which to enjoy the city vista.

We filled in our evenings with Hamilton on Broadway, cocktails in the East Village, Pizza in Little Italy and more pizza in Brooklyn. Drinks with a bunch of Aussie docs overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge was another excellent moment.

And so to the conference. It was certainly an opportunity to reflect on how far feminism has come and how far it still has to go. To think of the Doctors 100 years ago forming this Association and what it must of been like for them is very humbling. There were women at the conference from all over the world and some of them are still confronting really fundamental sexism in the workplace. As female doctors they are (and we are here too though with a lesser burden than other places) primarily responsible for supporting women with complex trauma, sexual assault, domestic violence, genital mutilation, victims of human trafficking and more. So there was an appropriate space to reflect on the challenges faced by medical women and the particular medical responsibilities we carry. Many of these were raised in the opening session inspirationally held in the UN.

The other big learning point for me was around the gender differences medically. I'm not talking about our reproductive organs. There is increasing awareness that men and women respond differently to drugs, that our medical risk pre and post menopause for important medical conditions like heart disease and obesity is under appreciated and that we need to be studying this more explicitly to be able to manage patients more effectively.

I pocketed my little pearls of wisdom but I have to say I did it with some frustrations. The conference was very US-centric so those fascinating stories from other countries were largely only glimpsed in question times or in a few specific presentations on specific medical studies. I also found the feminism in the room sometimes oppressive. "Down with the Patriarchy" drew applause. There were numbers quoted for women in leadership roles in medicine that I don't think reflects to complexity for women and indeed families. When these numbers are quoted baldly there is an unspoken criticism for those of us who chose not to pursue leadership. For those of us who slowed down for a big chunk of our career to raise children not because society required it, not because we lacked supportive partners and fiscal stability but because we wanted to. I think this totting up of numbers undermines the very important role that mothers play in society. Or primary carers of all colours of the rainbow for that matter. Perhaps more women choose to do this than men because our biology drives us to do so. If this is the case the numbers on the other side of the glass ceiling will never be 50% and that is not because all men are misogynists and not because women "failed" to reach their potential but because many of us choose to expend our energies at home and this is valuable. Equality is equal opportunity and this cannot be calculated in raw numbers at the top. There are some holes in the system (and in broader society bigger holes around reproductive control particularly in the US, I know, I can hear Elizabeth debating me in my head) and areas in which we can achieve better equality of opportunity but actually in Australia and dare I suggest in the US we medical women are doing pretty well. OK rant over.

The best part of the conference was connecting with the medical women I count as friends and mentors. Marjorie, Tash, Lisa and Mel you are special people.