The Prime Minister did not utter the word “woman” during his invective against general practitioners – “my patience has reached its limits”, François Legault will say – but it is just like. Women are clearly in the majority in the ranks of general practitioners (60%) and risk becoming even more so. Second, this is far from the first time they have been singled out, if only by the gang, in terms of declining “productivity” among family physicians.
In a text published in The duty in 2003, the former president of the College of Physicians Augustin Roy complained about female physicians who, unlike the good Dr Welby (a “model” doctor in an American series from the 1970s), took refuge in CHSLDs, a “golden hideout”, to take advantage of maternity leave rather than roll up their sleeves. At the time, we are at a time when the feminization of professional orders (medicine, law, notary, pharmacy) is accelerating and, everywhere, we are worried about the decreasing number of hours worked and we fear the denaturation. of the profession. Among veterinarians, for example, where there are then 47% of women, there is concern about the marked preference of women to treat pets rather than farm animals.
And then, in 2015, the Dr Gaétan Barrette, we still remember, as Minister of Health, stands up against lazy people, family doctors who do not “work enough”. “It’s not a question of model [de système de santé], he will specify a few years later, it is a question of attitude. “Whose attitude do you think? As said by this female doctor for whom François Legault’s reprimand was the straw that broke the camel’s back, general practitioners are “still called lazy.”[ses] and [accuser] to be responsible for all the evils of the system ”. Doctor Geneviève Côté recently left the public health network, outraged at the government’s “lack of recognition”, which perpetuates the myth of family doctors sitting on their steak.
It is true, however, that women who enter the profession do not do so with the same “attitude”. Often, they do not have the same ambition and do not always accumulate the same number of hours worked for the simple reason that they do not have all that to do. They have children, families, responsibilities and also a reward, a sense of who they are that doesn’t just come from their job. The Dr Welby, he, faithful to the great male figures of yesteryear, was only one thing: a doctor. He had a wife at home to take care of the rest.
The first generation of women (mine) part in the conquest of public space and professional achievement has done, it must be said, as if nothing had happened: by limiting pregnancies to the maximum and by not putting off too much in question the male model of work. We had to show that we were capable! But two generations later, especially where feminization is obvious, in law and medicine, it’s a different story. As Geneviève Côté says, it is a question of “values”. Moreover, women are no longer alone today in this questioning. Young men are also fed up with a model focused on productivity and performance. They want family life, too, and don’t necessarily have a wife home to rekindle the fire in the fireplace.
What is unheard of, therefore, is not that young doctors, men or women, want to work less. After all, the watchword as we speak is “degrowth”. We have to rethink our way of life, centered on hyperproductivity, if we want to avoid, said the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres this week, “from digging our own grave”. We must do less, not more.
Unheard of, on the contrary, is that we have never rethought the organization of work, beyond offering parental leave and daycare, in view of the massive arrival of women on the market. Even though it was a real revolution, like the industrial revolution a century earlier, this time around, we did not start to redevelop cities and rethink social structures. It’s always been up to women to adapt. However, if we see so many lawyers and female doctors today, it is precisely because these professions offer a certain leeway that cannot be found elsewhere. Yes, they are better “hideouts” for combining motherhood and paid work.
The real scandal is not that women want to work in good conditions and also have children. The scandal is that we are always making them feel guilty for not functioning like men. While we know that Quebec needs children (question of national survival), whereas we know that we have to rethink our way of working (question of planetary survival) and that in addition, an in-depth overhaul system is needed, we continue to see women as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
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