Thank you. I appreciate that question.
There are probably more similarities to the stressors and challenges that women face as professionals, throughout all the professions. The one that's unique to medicine is that both men and women in medicine face the fact that this is not how we see ourselves.
We in medicine are caregivers. We're not care receivers, and we don't see ourselves that way. Our personality traits are such that we put everybody else first. We will take care of ourselves, but only when everyone else is well taken care of.
What I see, and why I think the whole issue of physician health is so crucial, is that by the time physicians, including women physicians, come for help, we are probably further down that road than the average person would be.
The very nature of our business, where we spend our whole day taking care of others, means that we are at risk of burnout. But I think we hang in and try to cope. We see reaching out for help as some sense of failure or weakness. A lot of my work has been helping colleagues see that the real weakness or failure is in not getting help when they need it.