It was a prolonged and delicate operation. The chief surgeon asked the intern to assist. As she leaned forward, the surgeon’s elbow brushed against her chest. Under the glare of lights and the tension of surgery, she ignored it, keeping her eye on the job. Until he sighed, “How I wish there were lips at the end of my elbows.”

Sunday is International Women’s Day and there will be calls around the world to recognise women. The medical profession is a positively glowing light in comparison to some other professions’ treatment of women. After all, we long achieved gender parity in medical school and for some years, the ratio has been slightly in favour of female applicants.

So if we start with a group that is gender balanced, it might stand to reason that somewhere around half the graduates will go on to represent the profession in its highest echelons – professors and deans, heads of departments, lead clinicians, chief medical officers and so on. Alas, this is where medicine’s gloss fades.

In Australia, women account for a respectable 43% of general practitioners but only a quarter of specialists. You are much more likely to find a female paediatrician than female surgeon; a mere 9% of surgeons are women.

With their mix of innovative ideas and robust research, academic hospitals are a prestigious training ground for future doctors. A good hospital is a melting pot for the best brains in medicine and a lodestar for all kinds of aspiring doctors. No one will contest the value of women, but walk into a high-level meeting and the woman in the room is most likely to be the secretary.

In the testosterone-charged environment of the operating theatre, gender bias can be overt. A young surgeon recalls the comments he has heard directed towards his female peers. “Get me a cup of tea, love”; “You need strong hands for this operation”; “Don’t worry your little head about pathophysiology.”

Female doctors are labelled shrill, emotional, precious and soft.

Sexism in non-surgical fields tends to be subtle but no less corrosive. Female doctors are labelled shrill, emotional, precious and soft. Some time ago I met a male doctor who appeared at risk of not meeting his training requirements. He was supported with collegiality and mateship. His wife, a more insightful trainee I thought, was branded “useless” and advised to switch careers. Needless to say the man rose to become a specialist; the woman got there too, via way of a depressive episode and lingering self-doubt.

Sexism in medicine transcends national boundaries. At an international meeting, a physician gave me the heads up about his colleague. “She’s a flake,” he declared. “She doesn’t publish enough although I guess she’s good with patients.”

There ended up being two women at the table. Both had authored scientific papers. Both conceded that the whole work-life act was punishing at an academic centre that rewarded grants over patient care. They didn’t make excuses for picking up the kids but also checked labs at midnight.

“So which one was ‘the flake’?” I later asked the man incredulously.

“You couldn’t guess?” he grinned.

In 2007, Dr. Nancy Andrews became the first female dean to lead a top 10 US medical school at Duke. It took another four years for Monash University, my alma mater, to follow suit with Professor Christina Mitchell.

It’s difficult to imagine that no woman has previously aspired to the role but it is routine to find women overlooked for influential positions throughout medicine. Studies dating back decades show that female doctors neither advance as rapidly nor are compensated as well as men with similar professional qualifications. They face inequities in resource allocation and research space and are disadvantaged in the merit-based peer-review process.

A 1995 study showed that after 11 years on a faculty, 5% of women and 23% of men became full professors even after adjusting for productivity factors. By 2006, female representation in academia was on the rise but a New England Journal of Medicine study found they still languished significantly when it came to senior authors and guest editors in the six most prestigious medical journals.

In 2010 a University of Melbourne study found that even after accounting for the number of hours worked, the years of experience and other factors, female specialists earn 16% less than their male colleagues. It highlighted the little-known fact that the average gender pay gap in general practice (25%) is higher than it is for all of the nation’s full-time workers (20.7%), leading to principal researcher Anthony Scott’s vexed conclusion,

This is something of a mystery. While such differences persist in other occupations, this is particularly difficult to understand in an occupation where men and women have the same high level of education.

Women everywhere, no matter whether they perform heart surgery or serve coffee, carry a larger share of home responsibilities, which affects their career progression. It’s challenging in academic medicine to find sustained female mentors because many quietly move to a more conducive environment. But some of the most memorable influences in my career are the women I have met along the way.

I came of age steeped in the folklore that a doctor had written her PhD thesis during her short maternity leave. Ordinary is not a word one encounters commonly in medicine! Mercifully then, other women came along to normalise things. One early consultant had four children and cheerfully admitted to working part-time because “it keeps me happy and admin mad.” Another grinned that every Tuesday was Heinz night. There were tales of undone homework, sloppy lunches and arguments over who should empty the dishwasher. They described tricky negotiations with husbands over the weekend roster and guilt-ridden requests of parents to relieve the costly babysitter. They admitted that being a dedicated doctor tested their marriage.

I came of age steeped in the folklore that a doctor had written her PhD thesis during her short maternity leave.

“I haven’t slept for two nights because my son is ill. I can’t think,” confessed my female boss before going on to supervise an entire ward round with tact, sensitivity and sheer aplomb. What stayed with me was her complete willingness to demonstrate vulnerability in a profession that prides itself on always being at the top of its game.

These unheralded women have taught me a valuable lesson, that you can be good at your profession and deal with the stuff of everyday life and that invariably, a load of the latter makes you better at the former.

It’s been remarkable to witness the measure and sagacity with which so many women approach a career in medicine. They don’t allow it to define their whole life yet their patients think the world of them. We meet these women everywhere, doctors who would never dream of considering themselves as anything other than the person who gets the job done. They are the ones who stay behind to help the last patient, counsel the desolate intern and console the grieving widow. They do it without fanfare, which is why we should celebrate them.

We should celebrate them. In a field of stars, they have always struck me as the most radiant.