Dr. Suzette Sutherland
speaker
230 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Suzette Sutherland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I was going to just pepper something in there is a lot of times people think, well, women are taking longer to get promoted because they're having babies. But we know there's data to show that is not the case. That's not getting in the way of their promotion. taking off time to have their babies. It's not that at all.
And when you look at very well-qualified women who are going, as you just said, early promotion and going up against some of their male colleagues for early promotion, and they don't get it, but the male does. But the qualifications are there.
Gosh, that could be another podcast and probably should all by itself. I mean. So we see this very commonly, of course, we're in a very male-dominated field, urology, right? One of the most male-dominated still today of all of the surgical specialties, right? Has the lowest number of women. And, you know, women traditionally have tried to fit in to a man's world, right?
We certainly try to gravitate away from that to some degree and allow women to feel empowered to be themselves, even if it's extremely feminine and that is who you are and it makes you a great doctor. And the culture needs to embrace that, embrace those differences, as opposed to the women just need to fit in.
But even there are some business characteristics that are very advantageous if someone comes in and can be quite decisive about and can move the needle forward in a quick manner. That's great for business. But when men, women do that, they're oftentimes, you know, perceived as being bossy, or you're too pushy. You need to make sure that you have the consensus in the whole room and get
Kumbaya, have everybody put their arms around each other and feel good about what you're doing. But when a man comes in and is very decisive and says, this is what we're going to do, acknowledges you can't please everybody. I'm going to try to please most, but I'm not going to kumbaya and please everyone. And that's acceptable, right? It becomes really this catch-22.
You want to be effective in what you're doing, but you can't do it in too aggressive manner, right? or you're labeled, and then suddenly all these negative connotations are attached to you as a leader, right? And it becomes really difficult. So that's another hard one. And we just need people to wake up to that, right?
And to understand, and they can see that in the boardroom as an example, and recognize we have a very decisive woman here, giving great advice as opposed to being really pushy.
Yeah, that's a great point. So let's move on to the third myth, the big one. We call it the pipeline issue. You hear this term often. And what's really meant by that, the pipeline issue?
Right. With that example, whether it's male or female, you know, in academia, yeah, there are people that seem to stay in these positions for so long. And if you're going to change a culture and bring it up to date, you have to do it from within.
Yeah, that's really a great point, right? So we know that there's the stepping stones that have to happen, but who made those rules?
A big thing that you were talking about, you put it on the list of things, but I just want to go back and touch a little bit more about this because I think it really needs to be emphasized is the difference between changing a culture so that people feel that they are included, and they feel like they're part of that whole process, as opposed to the word we use is tokenism, right?
I have a very diverse department, says the head of the department. Look at my picture. It looks like a picture out of the colors of Pendleton, right? But do all those people feel like they truly belong and their voices are all heard? That's such an important thing. What can we do to really ensure
that you've hired these people, all of these different types of people, and how does everybody feel engaged?
So, and the last myth is that one we've already sort of touched on and talked about a bit, but just to say the last myth is the issue about diversity, having a diverse environment versus an excellent one. Are diverse candidates as qualified, right? Or are we just choosing diverse candidates because we need to feel we need to have a diverse environment?
And I think we've talked quite a bit about that already. I don't know if you have other things that To add, we talked about the inclusion. Workforces are much more productive, are happier workforces. So inclusion does matter. And it hits the bottom line, the bottom dollar line, too, in different businesses and organizations. And so we know that to be the case.
We want to wrap this up here at this point, but I want to give an opportunity to just sort of look at it overall. We talked about a number of myths that contribute to what we call the gender gap, right, with this discrepancy between men and women in the workforce and certainly in medicine and urology. A couple of big ideas is that issue of transparency is really paramount. That's so important.
The issue of having a diverse workforce, but then making sure that diverse workforce feels included in all the processes that are going on, right? That it really is almost a big family. And that's how you keep people happy. And that's how people then remain productive.
And I think one of the other things that you had talked about too was, you know, if you're the leader in that organization and you're not very diverse in your organization or you're losing people, you talked about the leaky pipeline, which is so important. You recruit people, they're not successful. You let them go. You say, well, they weren't successful because they weren't really qualified.
We hired them because they were, you know, either a Latina or they were a woman or they were whatever it was, right? Turn the lens back on yourself and say, what's going on in my organization that's not allowing us to be having a successful, diverse workforce, right? Looking back at the biases with your own organization.
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