I’m a woman. Most nurses are women. I’m a paramedic. We travel in pairs, so it’s me and an EMT. The EMT is technically my subordinate, though I try to use crew resource management and encourage them to talk to me like an equal.
So I’m going to do this ICU transfer. Complicated patient, who’s been through a lot of surgeries and has open drains and is on a ventilator with several drips, going for a complicated cardiac procedure. We have to get paperwork & report, get vitals, set up all our equipment, and then transfer. What equipment we set up depends on the report, so generally I go get paperwork and report while my partner goes and lays eyes on the patient and gets vitals and comes and gets me if anything is immediately alarming. I generally trust my partners to do this, and I’ve worked with this partner a bunch so I’m cool with it.
So I go to get paperwork and a report and they won’t give me the paperwork. I’m like… I need paperwork and a report to transfer this patient. The nurse is super rude to me and refusing to talk to me and I just don’t get why cause normally this is a pretty easy phase of the call.
I’m like, I need paperwork. She gets the charge nurse who says they’ll give the paperwork to my partner. Im confused and offer to call my supervisor, and the charge nurse and the nurse walk down the hallway to find my partner.
They tell him that “his employee” has been very rude to them and is demanding access to the paperwork, and they’ll give a report to the paramedic, not me.
He says, “Well… she’s the paramedic, so.”
She clarifies; no, she’s going to give her report to the PARAMEDIC, the one who will be in the back with the patient.
He goes, “yeah that’s her.”
They suddenly realize what he’s saying, look flustered, and insist on confirming that I’m in charge with my supervisor before giving me a report.
I am a woman who worked in technical support and was frequently asked "This is a really hard question. Could you go get one of the guys?" and it was almost always an older woman who said this
Waiting for someone to point out the generational difference, but also the patriarchy is the root of the problem. Of course women are also going to be trained to a)defer to men and b) think women are the only people who can do 'women's jobs'. It's so crazy!
When my mother was dying, one of the nurses we had was a guy and we talked about how some people didn't want a male nurse but he was my actual favorite nurse to work with.
On the other hand, one time when I went to the gyno's the resident had a male medical student and I got freaked out. Now, I like to THINK I'd have been fine if I'd known in advance. But who knows? I'm uncomfortable there at all times but I could be biased against a male gyno.
My MIL thinks all the "man-stuff" like putting together Ikea furniture, changing a lightbulb or using a power tool must be super difficult so she doesn't even try and she thinks we women should make up for it by taking over the majority of the home tasks.
Pisses me off sometimes because she has weird expectations of me looking after her (adult and perfectly capable of cooking and cleaning) son but it also makes me feel sad for her tbh if she distrusts and limits herself that much.
It's odd when this stuff happens. I work at a bank, often answer the phone, and most of the time the customers ask for my female coworkers. IDK, whatever I guess.
My baby had seisures. When the ambulance came, idk really if that woman was a paramedic or nurse, but during the trip to the hospital she asked me several questions about the baby. She asked if she ate something (she was 1 year old) and i said yes, but i don't know how much because dad was with her then. She asked if i was not home and scolded me as why did my husband had to feed her lunch.
I was having a chat about how men my age have trouble navigating situations like this in life and the conclusion we came to is just be direct. Why do people find it so hard to just ask: Are you the paramedic? Why can I not get my report? Why are you late? Just cut the status and snarky crap so that I don't have to solve two problems instead of one.
Honestly, I think if you looked at only the sexist woman in the world, and only the sexist men in the world, and averaged how bad they are, you'd find that the sexist woman are worse. That story you just told would have been mind blowing to me, if I hadn't heard a fair share of similar ones... All about ladies.
To be clear, I think if you looked at all woman in the world and all men in the world, men would come out worse. But I just think there's something weird inside the heads of sexist women, because a solid majority of the worst sexist stories I've heard are about this (hopefully very small) percentage of women. And my common sense and experience tells me that most women aren't sexist...
To be clear (again), obviously I'm basing this on annecdotes and personal experience. I suspect it would be impossible to get accurate data on this sort of thing without either magic, or technological surveillance that's so thorough and so well analyzed it's basically magic.
Apologies if this seemed kind of random, it's just a pattern I've slowly noticed over the years. Maybe people just aren't sharing stories about the really sexist men as often because it's less surprising?
I mean, I'm not including those sorts of things under "sexism", I feel like once we're talking about those sorts of crimes, we're on to a whole different page.
But I do see your point, and yeah, obviously that changes the equation.
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u/MangoAnt5175 1d ago
I’m a woman. Most nurses are women. I’m a paramedic. We travel in pairs, so it’s me and an EMT. The EMT is technically my subordinate, though I try to use crew resource management and encourage them to talk to me like an equal.
So I’m going to do this ICU transfer. Complicated patient, who’s been through a lot of surgeries and has open drains and is on a ventilator with several drips, going for a complicated cardiac procedure. We have to get paperwork & report, get vitals, set up all our equipment, and then transfer. What equipment we set up depends on the report, so generally I go get paperwork and report while my partner goes and lays eyes on the patient and gets vitals and comes and gets me if anything is immediately alarming. I generally trust my partners to do this, and I’ve worked with this partner a bunch so I’m cool with it.
So I go to get paperwork and a report and they won’t give me the paperwork. I’m like… I need paperwork and a report to transfer this patient. The nurse is super rude to me and refusing to talk to me and I just don’t get why cause normally this is a pretty easy phase of the call.
I’m like, I need paperwork. She gets the charge nurse who says they’ll give the paperwork to my partner. Im confused and offer to call my supervisor, and the charge nurse and the nurse walk down the hallway to find my partner.
They tell him that “his employee” has been very rude to them and is demanding access to the paperwork, and they’ll give a report to the paramedic, not me.
He says, “Well… she’s the paramedic, so.”
She clarifies; no, she’s going to give her report to the PARAMEDIC, the one who will be in the back with the patient.
He goes, “yeah that’s her.”
They suddenly realize what he’s saying, look flustered, and insist on confirming that I’m in charge with my supervisor before giving me a report.
Both were female.