I often think about space, specifically taking up/claiming space. My most conscious ponderings about space are while I’m running in the park near my house. I’ve observed that people are more likely to step aside for a male runner than me, a female runner. It’s so blatant that when my husband and I are running or walking together we strategically put him on the outside because people move over for him and not me. It’s an annoyance. I’ve started to run strong and serious. I’ve learned that a confident stride and a squared shoulder do help remind people that women also deserve to run without stride interruptions.

Guarding my lane while running is a newer claim of space for me. The first time I claimed space was changing how I sat. Changing my sitting stance was a project that took the better part of my twenties. For some reason women in my culture are taught to sit small and closed. I’ve found that sitting small is counterproductive. It has (perhaps) made it easier for males to harass me on public transportation and (definitely) made it easier for my colleagues in healthcare to ignore me. These days I try to sit large and open, just like my culture teaches their boys to sit. I don’t take the inside seat on the train/bus (that’s more for safety as I’ve learned the hard way) and I take up my whole seat even when it’s wider than I am broad. If there’s a seat at the table in a conference room, I take it. Which brings me to medicine, my most recent occupation (both meanings of occupation, wink, wink).

I have a very distinct memory from medical school related to being a female in medicine. I was mid-sentence presenting my section of a group presentation when a male member of my team cut me off, talked over me, and started his section of the presentation without letting me finish. It was so rude that several females in the class texted me in solidarity. The experience made me think about why seats at the table are not enough on their own. Seats must be claimed and, sometimes, defended.

Being a first-year resident brought with it a whole host of interesting space claiming challenges, many simply related to being a new doctor and some related to being a female physician. Filling the role of physician involved learning how to defend and explain my medical decisions, striving to take the high road and set boundaries when other members of my interdisciplinary team did not, and observing how physicians I admired conducted their doctoring and led their teams so I could model their techniques.

The challenge of being a new doctor exists for all new doctors. But filling the role of a female physician comes with its own occupational hazards. Here are some concrete examples from the past year of times I was reminded that I was female while at work:

• I frequently must remind my patients that I am not their nurse — a challenge that my male counterparts don’t have.
• My name is gender neutral, so nurses often think I’m male when communicating electronically with me before they meet me in person. (We have a secure chat in our electronic health record system that we use in the hospital). It is interesting to see how nurses’ tones change after they discover I’m female when they originally thought I was male. At times the tone change is dramatic and frustrating because I get more pushback as a female than as a male physician.
• I have been lectured by a male supervising doctor about what clothes a doctor should wear. The lecture was somewhat confusing given that all the female residents wear exactly what all the male residents wear… scrubs of similar fits, styles, and colors. I doubt any male resident teams have been subject to such a lecture, but my all-female resident team was.
• Several times I have found myself uncomfortable on rounds (that time of day when you talk about all your patients with the supervising doctor) because the male supervising doctor was very good at looking at my chest but never made eye contact.

The above situations illustrate that there are additional features of the medical terrain that female physicians must navigate that their male counterparts don’t experience.

As my second year of residency approaches (starts July 1), I’ll soon find myself no longer a first-year resident. In my second year of residency, I’ll start to be a team leader and I won’t be the new kid on the block anymore. I’m excited about this next step in my training. I feel ready to take on the challenge knowing I’ve learned a ton already and have a ton more to learn as a physician. I continue to have much opportunity for growth on my journey to lead with humility and excellence. As I wait for my second year to begin, I’m curious what the phase of “senior resident” (my title during my second and third (last) years in residency) will be like and the space challenges it will present. All adventures have space challenges however they present themselves in different ways.