Balancing scalpel and stroller: the unique challenges of surgeon mothers navigating maternity leave
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose Ideal family building years inevitably coincide with training and early career for surgeons. Quantitative studies have demonstrated that maternity leave for surgeon mothers can be a significant source of stress and indecision, leading to significantly shorter maternity leaves than both non-surgeon physicians and the general population. This study sought to qualitatively explore the experience of navigating maternity leave as a surgeon mother. Methods Surgeons and surgical trainees participated in semi-structured interviews that explored their experience of motherhood. Interviews were transcribed and de-identified. Constructivist grounded theory was for analysis. Open coding was conducted by the entire research team to establish familiarity with the data, followed by refined coding by two authors. Themes were discussed with the entire research team until the key themes were finalized. Results Sixteen surgeons across surgical specialties participated, including three residents and one fellow. An equal number had their first child in residency compared to in early career. Three major themes emerged from the data regarding maternity leave: (1) Productivity, (2) Pressure and (3) Policies. Productivity encapsulated the incredible amount of work that surgeon mothers continued to complete throughout their maternity leaves. This included completing advanced degrees, exam preparation, academic and research work. Pressure was evident both through external sources demanding productivity and early return to work as well as internal pressures and guilt to prove oneself as not lesser than colleagues once embodying the roles of both mother and surgeon. Policies were not in place to protect surgeon mothers during their maternity leaves, and this included policies to protect surgeons financially or temporally. Conclusion Surgeon mothers face unique challenges to navigating maternity leave due to current organizational and cultural norms. Addressing policies to support surgeon maternity leave is an important step, but policies alone will fail without cultural shifts and surgical leadership that truly support surgeons in their pursuit of motherhood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".