“I don’t reflect back enough on how much things have changed,” Cynthia Shortell (Durham, USA) tells Vascular News at the 2023 VEITHsymposium (14–18 November, New York, USA), speaking on the representation of women in vascular surgery over the course of her career so far. Despite this, however, she remarks that there is still work to be done.
The professor of surgery at Duke University recalls how she was initially reluctant to pursue a career in surgery due to a lack of female role models in the profession. “There were no women in surgery,” she remembers, “it just didn’t seem like a possibility”.
Shortell states she now has to “pinch [herself]” to see how far women in surgery have come in a relatively short period of time, although she is keen to stress that there is still a long way to go. She says that now is the time for action, advising what surgeons and aspiring surgeons can do to get involved in promoting the role of women in surgery, particularly in leadership positions. “We can’t just wait passively for things to change,” she stresses.
