Doctors alert: Tapping, jargon and nude frescoes

Comments about dress, pawing and missed promotions. 82 percent of France’s female doctors state that they have been discriminated against because of their gender.

– We who work in this environment are used to a certain jargon, which would not be accepted in other workplaces, states Marie-France Olieric, head of the gynecology and obstetrics department at the hospitals in the cities of Metz and Thionville, for the newspaper Sjukhusläkaren.

Olieric is also the president of Donner des Elles à la Santé, an organization that works for gender equality in the medical profession. Last spring, it commissioned a survey with the help of the opinion institute Ipsos, in which 30 percent of the female doctors questioned testified to unwanted touching. 17 percent said they had been subjected to regular abuse.

Furthermore, 16 percent of the 521 respondents stated that they did not receive a promotion because they are women. The justification was often that they had or were at risk of having children.

Add to that the fact that female doctors are sometimes told to wear make-up and skirts. And the murals in the AT doctors’ canteens in the state hospitals have nude, sometimes pornographic elements. The paintings, frescoes that, among other things, show only breasts and crouching women, are to be painted over, according to a decision by the country’s health minister. But there is also a movement that wants to have them classified as cultural heritage.