This particular breakout session is designed for women in GI, it's free-flowing, nothing pre-planned. We're sort of open to ask questions, don't necessarily know the answers, but we've had a good chat thus far. So certainly anyone who's in the virtual world and they want to type in a question, it's your time to shine. So the people who are actually here in the auditorium, do you have any particular questions or thoughts or even advice for ASGE, what you think we could and should be doing for you? I have a question about kind of work-life balance, but in terms of with children, how you found managing having, I have a daughter now and I find it somewhat difficult, especially to leave her at kind of crucial times, you know, at night, at bedtime when you get called in or on the weekend and they don't fully understand why you don't have normal work hours. Are there any advice on how to like... I wish Linda was here. Do we know where Linda is? Linda has advised us on her three pregnancies, her nannies, her childcare. We've actually learned a lot from her if she was in the vicinity. So maybe can we hold that question and see if we can track her down? Oh, here she is. She's the most popular lady of the afternoon. So come on down, come on down. Would you mind just repeating your question? So this Linda is really... Here, actually, take the seat here. Here. Oh, the hot seat? Yeah. I'll take it, I'll take it. So I just had kind of a general question about any advice you have balancing, you know, being a mom and working in GI. I use the example of my daughter, she's three and she doesn't fully understand when I have to leave at crucial times, you know, on the weekends or at night at bedtime. It's been kind of difficult to balance that. I have three kids. My first one I had when I was a third year resident, so almost that age. And I started GI Fellowship without... He was like maybe three months. And so, you know, honestly, it's about quality over quantity, you know, those complex strategies about making them feel heard and loved. So when I am with my kids, the phone goes away. I don't think about inbox, you know, at all. I try to work. I just, once I'm done, like I'm out, like I'm not going to sit there and perseverate about that. And so that I can just be there, even if it's only for 15 minutes, you know, half the time I put them to sleep and then I still, you know, I fall asleep half the time there, which is why I bought a full bed so that when they're sleeping there, a lot of times we just spend even 15 minutes, even if I'm home late. They need you more when they get older. I realized that my 10-year-old needs me in different ways than my two-year-old does. The two-year-old wants me around to change the diaper. Honestly, anybody can do that, but the 10-year-old wants actual like contact time. So it's quality over quantity. I wonder, I don't have children, but I wonder if you'll have a different perspective with a job that I think is probably going to be a little bit more, maybe less burdensome in terms of the nights away and the weekends away than fellowship is. At least from my fellowship schedule to my work schedule, I feel that way. And so maybe at least if you're looking for a job that could accommodate that too, probably. And so there's advantages and disadvantages to having kids during training. Having them during training long hours away, but you're sort of protected in terms of production and expectations because if you go join a private practice and you got to pay into overhead and do all those things, but you're on maternity leave, unless they have a built-in kind of cushion for that, you'll be taking a loss, right? And so, but at the same time, you generally at that point make enough to kind of cover the time and way more flexibility in schedules. I start scopes at seven in the morning, so I'm not there for the morning routine, which I hate anyway, like packing for school and lunches. I hate that. It's like a mad rush. I pay somebody to do that for me, but then I'm home at 3.30. It's still eight hours. It's still the contact time and stuff like that. I'm home. I do the games, you know, or whatever. And then, you know, that's the time, right? That's the post-school time. You want to find out about their day, et cetera. So you have that kind of flexibility depending on what type of practice you join. There's ways to make that flexibility work, whether it's in academics or private practice. So you can look for that. When you're looking for practices, you want a place that generally you're not the first lady ever. Because I find that when you have another woman there, it doesn't matter, you know, in what context. They don't even have to do the same thing as you do. If you have another lady, it's a little easier for you. Thank you very much. Any other thoughts or questions or anyone perhaps in virtual land? Nobody in virtual land, but I can maybe stimulate the conversation. I don't know if you guys know about what ASG has to offer. Do you guys know about the women's SIG or about the lead? Maybe you guys could just share what ASG has to offer. So from a women's SIG perspective, just in case you don't know what SIG is, it's a special interest group. This is its second year in existence. We have about 100 members. We are finding that getting our message out is a little on the difficult side, but we're working on it. For the next nine months or so, we should have six Zoom happy hour sessions. It's free to register. You don't actually even have to be a member of the SIG. It will actually be free registration if you happen to just click on the site. What we really want to do is to try and build this, build membership, because ultimately the goal is to have a committee, just the way there is a practice management committee or an education committee. There really should be a women in GI committee, but we can't immediately go from one to the other. We have to go through a process, and the process is creating a task force. So we do have the task force created. There are about 10 women on that, and hopefully the end product will be a committee. Like all committees, it would be a chair, a vice chair, 10, 12 committee members. Then by having a committee, you've got associated staff, you've got a budget, and you can do so much more. Then you can integrate with other committees, whether it's education, finance, practice management, things like that. So that's that aspect of women in GI. The other aspect is a program called LEAD. It's about leadership development. That as a program that ASGE offers is really more for people in early career as opposed to a second or a third year fellow. But it is important that you are aware that it exists so that you can then make it known that it is your desire to be part of it when your time comes. I will say it's probably most pertinent to the first five years out. I think if you're year 5 to 10, you've probably been through an awful lot of the learning, and it's probably not as beneficial to you. Because at that stage in your career, you're probably going to start entering a little bit more into management, business, finances. And then there's another program that exists, which is called the GOLD program, and that's actually open to men and women, whereas the LEAD is exclusively for women. I don't, I can't remember actually how many women per year are part of that. And, gosh, has anybody done it more recently than me? Because I did it about five, six years ago. I think it's 25, I don't remember exactly. Anything I can find out about, but by and large, you should be able to get on it with a little bit of support, perhaps from either your employer or a mentor at work or somebody who's involved in a committee at ASG, things like that. So it would be something to aspire to be part of, okay? It was a great program. I did it, I think, when I was about a year out, and it was wonderful. Really good. It was about strategies, about kind of trying to find the line between likability and assertiveness without coming off as the emotional one, you know? So that was, I think, very helpful. And I think, obviously, ASGE has things to offer, but always sort of like look on the outside. There may be other sort of programs, and it could be, for example, something like Women in Medicine. So it's more giving you insight into the other skills. It's not necessarily talking about your technical skills that you need some insight or knowledge on. There's a course called GRIT, which is about sort of resilience training. It's a once-a-year thing. They usually pick some sort of nice, fancy, desirable spa area, you know, you go for three or four days. There's one course actually just last week I signed up for, and it's a Harvard course about women in leadership. And historically, it goes over about three, four days. It was an in-person meeting. This year will be the very first time it's actually virtual. And I figured, you know what? You can do it virtually. You don't have to take the days off. And the site is open for 90 days afterwards, which is what a lot of these new virtual courses are doing, because they realize, you know, somebody isn't going to be available at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday and give up six hours type of thing. And you can do this in your own time. So that's something, obviously, that might not be something that's of interest to you at your stage, but there probably are other equivalents. Just do Google and have a look, because I think when it comes to your time of doing job interviews, and you heard a little bit about this earlier on today, what is it that makes you different to perhaps the other three or four people that the group is interviewing? So where do you anticipate your niche as such? And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to stick with that. It's not a lifelong commitment. But for a period of time, what makes you different? And it may be that if you can say, look, I did a couple of online courses and this, and this, and this. So something that was outside your current fellowship program that highlights that you went over and beyond to sort of develop yourself from a professional development perspective. Because nobody really looks at, we'll say, a second year fellow and think of, well, what have they been doing for professional development? But I think it's coming your way, that that's something that you'll need to start thinking about for your generation and the next coming through, because it is going to be more business and finance of the job. It's not just going to be, I can manage IBS, I can do a colonoscopy. OK. Anybody else got any other thoughts or questions, or even, Jennifer, any wise pearls of wisdom that you might have? So I just finished my training and interventional training. And I guess what I would say, having switched institutions, is that women become natural allies for whatever reason. And it's really wonderful and helpful. And it doesn't matter sort of what within GI you do. But I think it's really important to remember that and to partner with your colleagues within GI and across the institution who are women. Because there's a lot of challenges that we face that are just not talked about. And you'll be shocked at how many of the things that you're dealing with that you may not even realize is a disadvantage or a challenge. You may just think this is the norm. A lot of other people are going through it. And I think we just need to have our voices heard more. And we need to be willing to talk about it. So I have just found that really just partnering with other women who are going through it is just, first of all, just to talk about it. And that's the first step, I think, in leveling the playing field. So I would just encourage you to start talking about what you're experiencing, good or bad, that maybe is a result of gender in GI and endoscopy without being too specific or cynical. Don't put it on social media. It'll come back to haunt you. I noticed last year I was in your role doing the questions. But the group spent most of the time last year talking about salaries. I wonder if that's something. There was a fellow who had, by accident or somehow realized she was getting a lesser offer than her male counterpart. And that was where we had spent a lot of the discussion last time. I don't know if that. That certainly, for me, was always on my mind. And I'm not sure if that's just because that's where the conversation in women in GI comes with or in women in medicine in general or being underpaid or compared to the male peers. But when my, right, you're not supposed to talk about your contract, right, when you're going through it. And so for me, it was this trust issue. Do I trust that this group is offering me what they're offering the male that they just hired out of fellowship? How do I know? And it was a little bit of an insecurity that I had, but didn't know what to do about. So you raise a good question. And that was actually something that was raised during the week at one of our task force meetings as to that if we were potentially a committee downstream, how could we affect change in this area of sort of salary transparency or income transparency? It's not me. Someone else is going to dig a little bit more into that who has, shall we say, experience in that, because I think you need to have gone through that a little bit yourself in order to be enlightened and then help other people to make a decision. Because you see, where I am, we're salaried. It doesn't make a difference if you're blue, sunny, whatever. Everybody gets the same thing. So it's completely transparent, because we're all getting the same thing, which I then realize makes me not the ideal person to go down that avenue to make those inquiries. It really needs to be somebody who's got the experience to drive it. But it is on the topics to deal with. Yeah. Taking backing off of that, when you are doing contract negotiations, how do you have confidence in your self-worth? I feel like it's, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it's kind of easy to say, okay, I'll just take, okay, you're going to give me that. That sounds great. I'll take it and I'll do my work and I'll... Right, because the reputation is that women are worse negotiators or we're not as good at negotiating. I feel like I definitely would be a bad negotiator. I think I had, because of that, I think that actually put me in a worse position, is I had this complex, I am acknowledging that I am a weaker negotiator, that I don't maybe have the skills and I think it made me... So my group didn't negotiate and I had a lawyer who went in and I felt like a failure and I said, this is it, right? I'm a woman. I know I'm not good at this. It makes me very uncomfortable and I'm not getting anywhere. I must be, I'm doing it. I'm doing it wrong, because that's the feedback that you get, right? It turns out they don't negotiate and the two males that they hired after me got the same exact contrast and so it wasn't a failure on my part, but I felt that way. So I want to be careful too about putting that pressure on us being these great negotiators when sometimes negotiation is not what it... And maybe you would be rubbing them the wrong way if you feel like you have to do more negotiation than is probably appropriate and I felt like I was at risk of rubbing my group the wrong way and I think I would have been, but that's maybe just a personal... But I also think with current times and people speaking about diversity, equity, inclusion, employers are now more sensitive about that than perhaps five years ago and historically, because there are all sorts of things like a Freedom of Information Act. If for some reason there was a legal case about something and it came to light that an employer was employing you at $2 and a peer with the exact same qualifications and everything like that at $20, they wouldn't stand a chance. So I think employment law is... Not that the law will change, but I think that the employers will be much more sensitive. The last thing they want to do is to go down and particularly as more and more women are coming through medical school, residency, various fellowships, it behooves them to get savvy and say, this is an equal playing field. There's one question. Any specific tips to negotiate lower FTE, for example, 0.8 FTE as a female gastroenterologist, if that's really your priority? And then the comment that prior female GI weren't successful with this negotiation in that practice. So negotiating tips. I mean, to be quite honest with you, I would say that's not even up for negotiation. If somebody says that they need 80%, I mean, 80% means 80% of salary, 80% of vacation time. I mean, just give them the time that they need. If they're supposed to be employers that take everything into consideration, including, you know, joy, happiness at the workplace and things like that, I suppose it must depend on the work practice that that particular person is in. I would be surprised that their, you know, chair or practice lead would deny that. Because everything is prorated. And I think we're getting probably evil eyes, et cetera, that we, so maybe we might just turn off the virtual world and turn off ourselves. And certainly, if any of you have any, shall I say, ideas or things that you think that the women's SIG could, should be doing, or future thoughts for a committee, you know, as in tasks and things like that, what should we be tackling? It's important that we hear from you. And we really do want to hear about it. Okay.

work-life balance

motherhood and work

women supporting each other

challenges in GI field

professional development