A/Professor Amy Brodtmann
Melbourne neurologist Associate Professor Amy Brodtmann has thanked her former bosses for supporting her choice to work part time to raise children, but says many other female neurologists face ridicule and discrimination when they seek to reduce their hours to achieve work life balance.
In a ‘lived experience’ blog penned for Neurology journal, Dr Brodtmann describes the negative attitudes she faced from colleagues while raising three children and working as a neurologist, and thanks Professor Geoffrey Donnan and US neuroscientist Professor Marsel Mesulam for encouraging her to maintain her clinical and research work throughout motherhood.
But Dr Brodtmann, who practises at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and as a clinician-researcher at the Florey Institute, says that in her early career working in the US she felt ostracised and ‘professional squeamishness’ from male colleagues who believed that ‘family life’ was not an appropriate outside interest for a neurologist.
“I felt pitied and disdained in equal measure. It was clear that I was perceived as a lightweight, choosing children over my career. This carried with it the assumption that my clinical work and research were trivial, my ideas less important, and my papers more marginal,” she writes.
Dr Brodtmann writes how she was fortunate to have arranged part time work while other female colleagues believed this to be an impossibility because of ingrained attitudes within the profession that clinicians should not take time out to spend with their children if they are serious about their work
“To do so is to wage war against societal expectations, and enshrined beliefs that time away from work and research is time wasted; that to want to be home with your children makes you a sell-out; that hard-core researchers and neurologists must work double or triple time to be recognised as serious,” she says.
And it was hurtful to see contemporaries being promoted or being invited to contribute to collaborations with less papers and less experience than she had, simply because they were not part timers.
“My decision meant that the previously proffered circle of inclusion – to events, working groups, research proposals, papers – shrunk away from me. Opportunities for promotion stopped.”
However she welcomes the recent change in attitudes and lessening of the taboo around achieving work life balance and says her example means she is now approached by trainees and junior neurologists asking for advice and mentoring on working part time.
Her message is that the profession should celebrate the choice to have a part time career as a way of encouraging diversity and difference.
“Our outside lives enrich us, make us better decision-makers, better neurologists, better humans.
“This part-time life will not be right for many of us, but it may be right for some. Let’s not dismiss those who make that decision but celebrate and include that diversity too.”