Making career strides on International Women’s Day

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This article was published 08/03/2022 (1502 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Walk into Boundary Trails Health Centre, and you’ll see the bustle of any large hospital made up of health-care professionals from every field of study.

Walk into the surgical ward, and you’ll see something unique to the southern Manitoba hospital: 75 per cent of its surgeons are women, nearly three times the Canadian average.

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Jacalyn Thoren has long been a fan of working with her hands. Born in a small farming town in southwestern Ontario, she debated between working in an auto shop and going to medical school.

Throughout her time studying in Ireland, completing her residency in Ontario, and before coming to Boundary Trails, she said, seeing a majority-woman surgical ward wasn’t close to typical.

While 2019 data from the Canadian Medical Association shows 27.9 per cent of general surgeons in Canada are women, the number in orthopedic surgery is even lower: just 12.6 per cent.

This is what made walking into Boundary Trails — located between Winkler and Morden — last year, where 10 out of the 13 surgeons on staff are women, feel so different for Thoren.

“It was very different — even when I came for my (job) interview, most of the interview panel, because of the fact that lots of the surgeons were female, had a lot females at the interview panel,” she told the Free Press on Tuesday, which marked International Women’s Day.

“Whereas (when) I was up in Winnipeg, we’re still very male-dominated in orthopedics, where I was training.”

It hasn’t been an easy few years to be a health-care worker, regardless of gender.

Thoren noted it was “heartbreaking” to receive calls from patients waiting for surgeries as the province redistributed resources to COVID-19 pandemic efforts. She said she’d had to do some work building trust with patients hesitant around being tested for the novel coronavirus before surgery.

“I found that was a big thing with some people that weren’t comfortable with just getting the simple swab before surgery because they had beliefs that it would cause something, but then yet I could help them with their surgery,” she said.

“So I think just having them know that it was a two-way street, we need to be able to trust each other and talk out what each of our opinions are and see what works out best for both of us as a team together.”

Some of the hurdles Thoren faces are still based in misogyny. She finds herself sometimes having to explain to patients who immediately assume she’s a nurse she’s actually their surgeon and. When Thoren was starting out at medical school, she was told it was more important to focus on getting married and starting a family.

“In different types of surgery, too, some people, when I was having my children, they’d be like, ‘Oh, you want to spend more time with your family, so you probably don’t want to choose this specialty,’” she said. “But they don’t seem to do that for men — I was having children at the same time as one of my male residents, and none of that ever was brought up to him.”

Thoren feels the tide is turning, though. She is married with two young children, credits her husband’s help at home with being able to do it all, and she now hears patients say it’s good to see so many women serving as surgeons at the hospital.

She hopes to see more mentorship from women already in the field with students and newer surgeons.

“That was something I looked for that was hard to find, because there’s still so many men in the path, and that it was hard to find a mentor that was a woman. I think if you can be a mentor to the young people that are coming up, that would be really good for them.”

Ellowyn Nadeau, too, was interested in hands-on work from a young age, and helped her father, a mechanical engineer, with building projects around the family home.

It inspired a love of the craft that led to a career in civil engineering, becoming a supply chain management professional and later a construction management instructor at Red River College Polytechnic in 2015.

Last month, she was named the first chairwoman of the Winnipeg Construction Association board of directors in its 118-year history.

“In the field, we aren’t seeing the numbers of skilled tradeswomen increase much, as the workplace conditions can be more challenging than in an office,” Nadeau said in an email.

“Women still seem to have to prove themselves over and over, with each different project and each different crew, typically more extensively than their male counterparts. It’s frustrating, and we lose great women because of it.”

Nadeau began her career as a junior design engineer in the mid-1990s, and noticed there were few women working as engineers, particularly on-site at construction zones. She graduated in a class of more than 170 in 1994, and said maybe 20 or so were women.

She, like Thoren, is seeing change in the gender disparity in her field, but noted there’s still work to be done — including closing the wage gap in the industry and more women in leadership roles at Canadian construction companies.

“The number of women in engineering and construction has definitely increased over the years. I see and learn of more and more women at the table for project meetings and women leading projects,” Nadeau said.

“It’s more common now than ever to see announcements on LinkedIn (website) about women taking on management roles in engineering and architectural firms. In the field, we see a few more women taking on roles in safety, carpenters and some electricians… However, the other trades have very few women.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca