Women Junior Doctors

From the Telegraph

The contracts also change the current automatic pay progression that means a trainee doctor’s salary goes up every year. Under the proposed changes, doctors who take time out of their training for maternity leave or to study for a PhD will not be eligible for the automatic rise.

You get an automatic pay rise when you take a year out to spend it changing nappies? And some people think it’s wrong for the government to be stopping this? Are you a better doctor after you’ve spent a year with rattles and warming bottles? No, so why should you be paid more?

“It’s really difficult if you’re trying to put a roof over your children’s’ heads,” says Tamsett who has just had her first child and is currently on maternity leave. “The fact that I could work part-time was one of the reasons I thought medicine was a good career for me but now I’m faced with the prospect of returning to a job that demands longer hours for less pay.

Go back to work and hire a nanny then. £32K will cover it and you’ll be better off if the finances matter.

But female doctors particularly feel they will be penalised by the potential new contracts. “If you’re a mother as well as a doctor, you’re hit extra hard,” explains mother-of-two Dr Rachel Clarke, 42. She gave up a well-paid career in TV production to retrain as a doctor and is now doing her core medical training in Oxford, where she earns around £20,000 a year.

What clown allows people in their late-30s to do medical training? Seriously. It costs £250K to train a doctor and there are limited places. If you consider that someone normally works for around 40 years, that’s like training half a doctor.

Sarah, a 31-year-old junior doctor in anaesthetics who didn’t want to give her full name, is worried about the effect the contracts would have on gender equality within the medical profession as a whole:
“As the majority of medical school graduates are now female, it is clear that penalising against trainee doctors for taking parental leave has widespread implications for medicine as a profession, just as we were making strides in the area of gender equality.”

Widespread implications being that more men, and women would rather hand their kids to nanny go into medicine raising the total capacity of doctors? And this is a bad thing, how?