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Women in GI
Expert Commentary on Thriving as Women in GI

Released: September 14, 2023

Expiration: September 13, 2024

Anita Afzali
Anita Afzali, MD, MPH, MHCM, FACG, AGAF
Aline Charabaty
Aline Charabaty, MD, AGAF, FACG
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Key Takeaways
  • Choose mentors and sponsors strategically, but also consider how the relationship could be mutually beneficial. With thriving mentor‒mentee relationships, mentors can assist with personal and professional growth.
  • Recognizing your self-worth is key to self-advocacy. Remember that self-advocacy and self-allyship go hand in hand while working toward aligning all areas of your life with your core values and self-worth.
  • Work‒life balance can help prevent burnout, whereas work‒life integration will enable you to be your full self at work, helping you to be more present for both your patients and loved ones.

Women in gastroenterology (GI) face significant obstacles to professional advancement that often discourage women in medicine from pursuing careers in this specialty field altogether—while intensifying dissatisfaction and threatening career longevity in those who do choose a GI career path.

This commentary summarizes insights from the CME-accredited podcast series “Equipped and Empowered: Thriving as Women in GI,” created in collaboration with Scrubs & Heels, which provides women with strategies that empower them to cultivate professional growth and unapologetically design a career path that supports their ambitions at work and home.

Finding Your Friendtors: Mentors, Sponsors, and Allies
There are many potential barriers that women in GI may face during their careers. Instead of internalizing these barriers and giving them more power over us, we must instead focus on how we can achieve our professional goals by first recognizing what we are good at and what we are passionate about, defining our short- and long-term goals, and then strategically completing the necessary next steps to achieve them. On the other hand, although it is very important to have a career focus and plan, we shouldn’t get stubborn or rigid about it; instead, we need to recognize that goals can shift over the years. It’s important to be open to change and be brave enough to pivot and embrace unexpected but high-yield opportunities as long as they are aligned with our passions.

However, one mistake women often make is taking on this professional journey to success alone; to achieve greater and wider success, it is crucial to establish strategic and key alliances to support us in that journey. Indeed, by cultivating relationships with mentors and sponsors who can guide us and open doors for us, the results of our work and efforts can be amplified and better recognized. For these relationships to be effective, it is crucial for the mentee to be proactive and to understand what both parties are bringing to the table. At the end of the day, these relationships are mutually beneficial, allowing both parties to grow in terms of their academic and professional pursuits. The cherry on top is when mentors, sponsors, and colleagues become more than a professional network: Over time, these bonds can forge friendships that also contribute to your personal growth and to your support system outside work. Having these friendtors adds joy and fun to our professional world and integrates our professional and personal growth journeys.

Embracing Your Value: Tools and Strategies for Optimizing Professional Growth and Development
What does it mean when we talk about our own market value? How do we identify that? Self-reflection is an important place to start. You can consider 3 key questions. One is, what are my strengths? Your strengths may change or improve over time. Two, what core values do I bring to an organization? And three, what are my interests? Your interests, as you know, may evolve over time, as well. Recognizing and having a good idea of your own value will enable you to self-advocate and seek out opportunities for professional growth and development. Self-advocacy also entails the ability to do ground‐level detective work to understand what is needed in a given situation and what you can contribute at the negotiation table.

Self-advocacy is important for individual professional growth, but self-allyship is just as important—and seldom talked about. The concept of self-allyship is like 2 woven threads that together drive action for positive change: one being self-improvement and the other self-preservation. Recognizing the need for a balance between the two is key. We must always strive toward self-improvement, but setting clear boundaries is also key for continued growth. Once set, you must value yourself enough to be able to articulate that with stakeholders, with peers, or in various environments. Lastly, we need to remember to always practice these actions with curiosity, humility, and grace.

Being Your Full Self: Pursuing Work–Life Balance
To achieve fulfillment at work and in our personal lives, we should aim to foster a healthy work‒life integration that works for us and can be adjusted at different stages of our life. The goal is to keep the joy and excitement in what we do at work, enjoy our passions and relationships outside work, and avoid burnout. A key aspect of this is knowing that it is okay to say no. In fact, it is critical to do so. You do not have to say yes to every work opportunity that comes your way. When you say yes, be sure you do so for what is meaningful for you, will advance your career, or will bring you joy and personal growth.

Two, when you start a new project or task, find your team—people with whom you want to collaborate. Remember that you don’t have to walk that journey alone or prove to anyone you can do it without help.

Three, fill your cup daily. Don’t wait for a big vacation or retirement to take care of yourself; small activities for self-care are impactful, whether they are walking in nature, exercising, seeing your friends, or spending time with loved ones. This is crucial not only as a reminder to be present for our loved ones and for ourselves, but also to have the energy and the enthusiasm to take better care of others, including our patients.

Finally, it’s good to just be still sometimes and carve out time in the day when we’re not doing anything. This is often when the creative juices start flowing, and we can think about projects that advance our professional career or connect the dots between what brings us joy and personal growth and new career opportunities. Allowing moments of self-reflection can really help us bring more creativity into our professional life.

Taking all this into consideration can help us truly integrate work and life. Instead of thinking that we are 2 people—one at work and one in our personal life—we must integrate those selves. Instead of balancing 2 worlds, we should bring our personality, our interests, and what brings us joy into our work and allow our professional circle to become part of our personal growth and network.

Your Thoughts?
How do you work to overcome barriers to your professional and personal goals? What is the advice that you wish you would have gotten earlier in your career? Answer the polling question and leave a comment to join the discussion.

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