“Men often feel shame in the workplace since other employees look at them as less of a man if they are considered to be ‘househusbands.’”
“Switzerland is 50 years behind other countries in terms of gender roles.”
“Those are also the childbearing years and many women have to decide between children and a career.”
“A lot of women need to decide whether they want to renounce having children or have a career and you can't have it both ways.”
“Ten years ago, we were looking for men who were working part-time in medicine, and we couldn’t find a single one.”
“We didn't have hardly any female professors . . . It's gotten a lot better now, we are up to almost 25.”
“Practically all of them are working 100%.”
“What being a mother means needs to be understood by men too.”
“New generations have a different view of the world.”
“You can only have a career if you work upwards from 80 [%] and even with 80 it will be difficult.”
“I knew one guy who wanted to work 90% as a surgeon and the boss there said you either come 100 or you dont come at all . . . no surgeon ever works only 90%.”
“There was even a project call MIO [Mothers in Orthopedics] where two women shared leadership of the department.”
“The passing of information takes too much time . . . but they realized thats not really true because part time women work a lot harders . . . you're much more focused on getting that work done.”
“It's men who get the cushy jobs.”
“It's not gonna be Mrs. Miller [made up woman who put in hard work] who gets put in a charge it's gonna be a man.”
“I remember 20 years ago, my boyfriend was the first guy who took care of his kids 50% of the time . . . Shared childcare, that was new and unheard of. There were tons of women doing that too but none of them were getting brought food.”
“In Switzerland women’s right to vote . . . the last canton was forced to give women the right to vote in 1994 . . . it wasn’t voluntary.”
“Medicine is becoming more diverse.”
“The woman who gave me my first job, she's long retired but she was one of the first female professors . . . role models … she had 4 children and then her husband died and everyone said oh well you can't pursue a career now but she did.”
“I'd say it's the role models, there's more and more over time. Women having careers and proving that it is possible.”
“It's this rigidity in viewpoints and this very Swiss belief in a steep hierarchy and often the people at the top when they make decisions they become very political.”
“You have people who don't have very much knowledge of medicine making decisions.”
“I thought it would move a lot faster, it's moving really slowly.”
“Some think that being tolerant of women is gender equality and having them do the jobs that are attributed to female-ness. We’re not that much more caring or giving, that's just the culture that says you are because you bear children.”
“A lot of women want to have it both ways. They want to see their children taking their first steps and at the same time being a professor. You have to prioritize . . . you can't be everywhere at once.”
“And the guys who have this role, they have a harder time being accepted by other men as a real man. You’re only half a man if youre looking after kids the whole day.”
“You get much more respect if you're a CEO rather than just bring up children.”
“Usually the men are further advanced in their career and have better pay. That's usually where the split happens.”
“We’re on the border of Germany here so we have a whole lot of German doctors because the Germans are willing to do more work for less pay.”
“The new generation isn’t interested in working 60 hours a week and this is unheard of in medicine.”
“Human resources have been struggling with job sharing due to the lack of work being produced.”
“The more you climb this ladder, the worse it gets."
“If the department head is always shaming, then you have a high competition of not doing mistakes or shaming others then you would appear better in front of the chief of the department.”
“If you are passionate about a thing then you are willing to give more than you would normally give into a job because it is really exhausting”.
“You need a lot of passion to fight through it.”
“You would have 20-25 patients on one floor and you are the only responsible person."
“If you are young you are totally overwhelmed, because you would have worked with 2-3 patients now suddenly you have 20 new patients and you get lost.”
“It's the gratitude from the patients are so thankful and I love the confrontation transition.”
“The problem is that you are not prepared well, the studies don't resemble what you work on at all.”
“There was three or four days that I was alone on the floor with the patients and everyday I just hoped and prayed that no one would die because I had no idea how to read through lab reports… It was so bad and I couldn't sleep anymore it was really bad."
“I had an abortion because we had to work so much and he was a consultant in lucerne and I was in Basel and we lived somewhere in the middle and I always had to travel, we never saw each other because of shifts."
“People never believe me when I tell them what I earn, but it's not that much.”
“I have a very good friend. She is an orthopedic surgeon and I know for them they have to do strength training… if you have an overweight patient and you have to do surgery on the hip, you have to hold the whole leg and replace the hip while carrying this weight.”
“I had to ask for a woman because there was a man and he wanted to be my mentor and I said I’m just with men, all my senior consultants are men…you dont have so many women the more you climb this career ladder there is less and less.”
“Courses that are a must for the heads on how to lead, we don't learn how to teach, never. We want to be good teachers or we don't care… Courses for the heads that make them have to prove that they are good leaders.”
“The medical system is very ill.”
“GP in the countryside because there you get to do x-rays and much more clinical stuff.. In the city you have specialists all around, some of us don't do anything technical, you just send them to a specialists.”
“Medicine is that job that people still see as a calling and they don't understand that you have other interests than medicine.”
“People expect alot from you and the more you give the more they ask.”
“People that teach us, supervise us, and mentor us are older men not only the generation difference but also gender difference. They are older men which have given everything for their career. Probably had a wife at home that took care of their family and everything then they could pursue 150% career.”
“I was looking into other specialties and I was told well you're a woman, you're going to have kids right so just stick to a GP or pediatrician don't try to do something else… this is things you hear and as a woman you don't get the same chances.”
“They never told me I was not capable, but it was more your priorities are going to change.”
“I will have to choose it will be career or family.”
“Its either medicine or something else, I won't be able to do both.”
“Your seeing one patient after the other in my days I've seen 20 plus people and I’m drained, but I work eight hours.”
“I have no problem working 10 hours if I have downtime… sometimes I find it tougher working now eight hours because I’m seeing nonstop patients.”
“A big problem in medicine is that we are always asked to do more, see more. We never became doctors just to produce or just see people. We like stories, we like cases, we like diagnosis, we like the scientifical part, but you also need to process and we don't have time to process that anymore because we are asked to do more more more.”
“It's the pressure, it's always asking more from you.”
“They go from the hospital to the private practice and then they realize it's not getting calmer.”
“I remember during my studies everybody told me don't worry, after six years it's going to get better. You finish your studies and now you're a resident and people tell you it's getting worse, yes but don't worry, in five years it's going to get better then you graduate and you're a GP and you're like it hasn't gotten better.”
“I still love what I do, but to this condition I don't agree.”
“Honestly I don't know as a woman how you do orthopedics.. I had back aces just by helping.”
“More than once I had this feeling of how do you put that in your hand, and yeah it was all big tall guys.”
“I wanted to go into more male heavy specialties because it's less drama… Something I noticed in my last 11 years is you don't choose a specialty because it's scientifically interesting, you choose it because it's the kind of people you belong to.”
“My problem is that all these specialties there is one female, I would get bored after six months. That's why I chose GP.”
“It was a toxic environment, when you are five years into training at one hospital you cannot be with a team you don't feel that you belong to.”
“When I was in my 20’s I wanted to be a mother before 25, then suddenly I realized by 25 I would have just finished school.”
“ Do I music and medicine or do I have a family?”
“I’m one of these first-generation students. I think this was not so easy.”
“What kind of pushes me is really to see in everyday life that there is inequality.”
“I think the role model aspect is very important here. Good leadership practices are important. To have these role models in academia and the STEM fields, there are not so many female professors, and the young female students need role models.”
“When I started at ETH, I had these fixed term contracts. It’s linked to financial insecurity, that was frustrating.”
“ETH is a huge institution, to be able to change something is very difficult. When you start working, you are so enthusiastic and want to make a change. But you have to realize it is small bites. Very small steps, sometimes steps backwards.”
“Some tell me it is frustrating that I am the only woman in the research group. They feel very alone.”
“There are hierarchical problems. Academia is a very hierarchical place. Some people abuse their power.”
“The insecurity of not knowing where it leads. Those who want to continue in academia do not have a set position. This pyramid, a lot of students, and at the top there are very little positions.”
“The mobility aspect of the academic field is a challenge not only for the female researchers, but more so for them. The question of do I want children comes at the time when they should really work 200%.”
“Every year we organize a networking event and in the afternoon we have a panel with female professors, they talk about their career path and the question of family is the most important topic that the young researchers want to know. They want to know when they had their children, how they do it with child care, what kind of partner they have, and it is always a very open and lively discussion. Some really say in a second life I would do it differently. The question of the partner is always very important. Some say my husband is home, he is 100% at home, otherwise it would not work. If they both had a career, it would not work.”
“Her research is focused on Gendered Innovation. Her main example is crash test dummies, which are not women’s shape, no pregnant women.”
“The target group are our female PhD students and post-docs. We have several offerings. We offer coaching, we offer courses on career relevant topics: leadership, networking, and so on. We also have two different mentoring schemes, one to one mentoring and peer mentoring. We also have this mentoring event. We really try to support these young scientists in their career.”
“There was this initiative that more people should be hired in the hospitals and the medical field, and this was accepted by the people in Switzerland, but I’m not sure how the process really continued.”
“I think mentorship can be so valuable. We offer it within our program, and many students have their mentors without the umbrella of a program, and I think this should be mandatory.”
“What we experience in the mentoring with our program, is that mentors benefit too.”
“What I experience at the moment is that, when I started working at ETH 10 years ago, the Equal Opportunities Office was really focused on equal opportunities for woman and man. And now this has shifted to all the diversity dimensions, which I think is absolutely important. But there are not enough resources to really work on all of these diversity dimensions. From my point of view, the equal opportunity to fight for women is still not accomplished and is a bit swept to the side.”
“Some people are born to be doctors.”
“I think maybe for me the biggest challenge was in switzerland. I am from finland originally and finland I think that in the culture is much different with men and women. I never felt like I had a disadvantage being a woman.”
“I never felt a disadvantage in Scandinavia or in the US being a woman, but later in Switzerland when I had a child. I mean childcare is extremely expensive here.”
“So being a mother and specializing in medicine as we know takes time from your residency and you have no time whatsoever. You work day or night or on the weekends and then you have a child.”
“You need a good plan. You need to pay a nanny or daycare and then eventually your child goes to kindergarten.”
“You have children at the same time you are studying or in residency and residency is already brutal.”
“You don’t earn much money and you are away day and night and then you have to pay childcare which is like half of your salary.”
“I have come to realize that a lot of studies, historically and traditionally, have studied a population that is quite limited; mainly white men.”
“My gender has had an impact on my choices [within the medical field].”
“In Switzerland it still quite difficult to combine residency and research.”
In response to significant career concerns: “having the money for childcare.”
“For female doctors, the childcare issue is definitely a big issue.”
“A lot of diagnoses can be ruled out based on patient history … taking patient history is horribly inefficient, whether remotely or in person so you don’t have time if you want to make any money. This can lead to wrong diagnoses which can lead to unsatisfactory experiences as a patient.”
“I was in a way very lucky to have a child during my research so I wasn’t into my residency yet … I probably would have postponed having a child until I reached senior positions and at that point it might be too late.”
“You really don’t have that much time to a family so you might have focus on one.”
“Nurses, they work day and night and they don’t make a tremendous amount of money. And then when you’re working you need childcare and basically you salary just goes right to childcare.”
“I very much like the mentorship programs. Medical faculties should have similar mentorship programs … we didn't have any mentoring programs in the medical faculty.”
“The 1 to 1 mentoring is important and the mentoring in academics and residency would be very valuable.”
“Most chief departments women are sharing the position … There is this mentality that if its a women [there] must be two women instead of one.”
“The Faculty meeting was put at 4:00 so women could pick up their kids…Men should pick up the kids as well its not the women problem its the problem [for] families.”
“We put these rules in favor [to] women so that women can accomplish their duties which in reality are feminine duties.”
“In the US, I had all these career mentorship, these women career leadership [and] these courses were great… definitely more developed there they have a structure [and a] certain way of thinking. Switzerland is trying to copy I think to adapt to this different mentality.”
“We are not trained to do mentorship, everyone is doing it based on his or her own experience and personality, I didn't have to follow any training [as a mentor].”
“We are not taught how to teach we are just put their [and] for your career you need to have a certain number teaching [hours]... we are also not taught how to manage and I didnt have any business courses If i'm directing a department I need to know something I don't have the skills to do it I don't have the background to do it. You learn by doing.”
“I want to go back to have dinner with my kids and this should be a normal thing not only for a women but I think for men [too]...and this type of mentality needs to change.”
“Switzerland is not innovating in the hospital so they are very traditional. We are working as we did 20 years ago, which is not possible. I think with a change in women and men proportion there must be a change a shift in thinking.”
“I knew that there have been many students, and about half would go out because they do not pass the exams.”
“From the beginning, many things interested me. I liked to learn, it is how we function.”
“After the exam, I had to see that a lot of women chose not to get a specialty or not to keep going.”
“It was hard to find a place. It was perhaps harder for women. It was again five or six years to learn and work. Many women learned a little bit, got married, and left the field to go have children and a marriage.”
“Colleagues in surgery had much more problems with the people higher in the career. Mostly men.”
“I know many colleagues who had this problem. I did not have this problem, I cannot complain that I was pulled down, but my friends were.”
“The women who make a career seldom have one or two children, and often no children.”
“Now we have enough doctors, but more of them are specializing, so we have fewer people for General Practitioners.”
“Now that’s a big problem, not enough nurses. We had many of them and they left.”
“She has to delegate the responsibility. It can be emotional but you have to do it.”
“Don't study medicine, there is no job for you.”
“I had [a] feeling that it wouldn't be possible to work part time in medicine because nobody did that at the time.”
“I was always in a less women than men area.”
“I ended up always working full time, even with family… there are very few that do both.”
“Where is daycare[s] long enough so you can drop your child [off] early if you don't have a husband who does that and pick it up late depending on your shift.”
“If your child has a little more than a runny nose... You have to get it out of childcare.”
“[Some] childcares take sick children.”
“If it's a great group of people you can learn a lot from others.”
“I personally don't think my gender was affecting my career negatively.”
“The biggest challenge is to have two medical doctors and [raising] children.”