PORTUGAL: Controversy Rages Over Sexist Remarks by Health Authorities

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Jun 10 2004 (IPS) - A storm of indignation was set off in Portugal by public remarks from the heads of medical institutions calling for measures to revert the growing majority of female students in medical schools.

Health Minister Luis Filipe Pereira jumped into the fray, ignoring the outcry sparked by the statements from doctors Antonio de Sousa Pereira, president of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB), and Germano de Sousa, the head of the Medical College.

He spoke out in their defence after they called for quotas for men or some other measure to limit women’s admission to the country’s medical schools.

”It isn’t sexism. It’s a reality that women get pregnant and have to avoid contagious diseases and definitely cannot perform microsurgery operations that can last up to 12 or 14 hours,” said Sousa Pereira in an interview this month in which he pointed out that ”a majority of the students in medical school are women.”

In addition, ”there are medical specialties that are not very attractive or suitable for women. For example, there is only one woman urologist in Portugal, because I believe a man feels embarrassed consulting a female doctor in that discipline,” he added.

In Portugal’s public universities, the strictest grade point requirements are set by the medical schools. Only students with a grade point average of at least 18.5 out of a maximum of 20 are admitted, compared to university departments like education, psychology or sociology, where the minimum requirement is a grade point average of 11.5 or 12.

Both Sousa Pereira and de Sousa acknowledge that the greater number of women studying to become doctors is largely explained by the fact that more women than men meet the grade point average requirement.

But that is why they argue that to keep the number of female physicians down, medical school admission criteria should be modified, and ”exclusive quotas for men should be created,” according to the director of the ICB.

According to Ministry of Higher Education statistics, there are currently a total of 6,067 students registered in medical schools around the country, including 3,798 women and 2,269 men. And in the first year of medical school the proportion is 709 women students to 409 men.

That is in line with a trend seen in many countries around the world, where women now comprise a majority of university students.

It also forms part of the general trend in Portugal, where two-thirds of all university students are women, while 75 percent of undergraduate degrees go to women.

Sousa Pereira made his controversial remarks on Jun. 2, and the next day there were howls of outrage from analysts of both genders in the national press. But de Sousa chimed in to defend the director of the ICB, arguing that if the imbalance in the number of male and female medical school students is not altered, ”many problems could arise in the future.”

Although he said he was opposed, ”in the abstract”, to the creation of a system by which slots in the university would be specially reserved for men, ”because quotas are always created to defend inferior beings”, the president of the Medical College admitted – ”speaking in an unofficial capacity” – that he was worried about the problem.

In his view, ”maternity distances women from their service, reducing their capacity to fully dedicate themselves to their profession.”

”We must reflect on a medical profession that is becoming more and more female-centred”, said de Sousa, who argued that the government and university authorities should ”agree to enter the debate.”

But what was totally unexpected, and triggered the greatest indignation and wholesale criticism, was Health Minister Pereira’s response.

In open support of the two doctors, he said women were less available to dedicate themselves entirely to the medical profession, due to ”the domestic obligations of their family life.”

”Medicine is an activity that requires dedication 24 hours a day,” said the minister.

Just a few hours after his remarks were made public, a group of women lawyers, doctors, professors, sociologists, artists and researchers from a number of scientific disciplines met in Lisbon to demand that Pereira be removed, ”because his words do not befit a member of the government.”

At the same time, the Democratic Women’s Movement (MDM) said the statements of the three doctors were an ”ideological offensive” in line with the privatisation of public hospitals currently being carried out by the conservative government of Prime Minister José Manuel Durao Barroso.

Private ”business interests (in the health sector) deny maternity its status as a social function and see it as a burden that inhibits women who work,” complained the MDM, adding that ”the feminisation of the health system appears to worry many people, especially the big ‘Barons of Medicine’.”

The president of MDM, Regina Marques, told IPS that the debate of a possible limit on the number of medical school slots for women ”reflects indescribable sexism”, which she said is possible, however, in a country where a ”patriarchal society still reigns”, even though it belongs to the European Union of the 21st century.

Lawyer Filomena Delgado, a representative of the Portuguese Union of Women Jurists, pointed out that in Portugal ”there are already more women judges than men in courts of first instance, which means it would make sense to wonder if they are also thinking about limiting the number of female students in law schools.”

The press also joined the debate, with editorials and columns critical of the idea of somehow restricting the number of women students in medical school.

Helena Ferro da Gouveia, who identified herself as a ”reporter and mother” in an opinion column published by the newspaper Público de Lisboa, accused Sousa Pereira of expressing ”sexist preconceptions without owning up to it, according to which a woman is merely a uterus at the service of the reproduction of the species.”

In the Jun. 9 edition of the magazine Visao, the ‘Tendencies’ column, which comments on the weekly doings of the country’s politicians, gave a ‘thumbs down’ ”to Health Minister Luis Filipe Pereira who engaged in ‘philosophical’ ramblings on the poor aptitude of women for exercising medicine, given their domestic ‘obligations’.”

On the eve of the Jun. 13 elections for the European Parliament, the minister’s ”incredible ineptitude could figure in the Guinness book of world records”, according to the column.