It was early morning—likely the first appointment of the day. The music in the waiting room had not even been turned on yet, and the smell of coffee was just beginning to meet the air. After a few minutes, I was called back to a room and sat in the exam chair, already in scrubs and mentally preparing to scurry off to work right after. In fact, I was already building a to-do list in my head. I was grateful to have the time to tend to my own health amidst a busy schedule—but also eager to get back.

The dentist eventually entered and launched into a breathless spiel about invisible aligners and how they might help my jaw pain. “You probably have a lot of stress in your job as a nurse,” he said at one point, which snapped me out of my mental list-making and back into the room. My senses heightened. All I could manage was, “Doctor. I am a doctor.”

This assumption took me by surprise in ways it had not before. This certainly was not the first time I had been assumed to be a nurse. Maybe what struck me this time was how quickly my role had been decided for me, based solely on my attire and my symptoms. Sadly, this experience is far from unique. The assumption that women in scrubs are nurses reinforces outdated gender roles and undermines the visibility of women physicians and professionals in other roles in medicine.

Medical education has long been male-dominated, creating divisions, silent expectations, and constructs in curriculum and training that have persisted for decades. To put this into perspective, in 1950, females represented only 6 percent of physicians, which was thought to be the result of challenges of having a career in addition to maintaining domestic responsibilities at home. In contrast, according to AAMC Physician Specialty Data Reports, 37.6 percent of the physician workforce and 53.8 percent of U.S. medical students in 2022 were female. To put it simply, even today, at least one out of every three physicians and one out of every two medical students is female. So why does the stereotype still persist—that men in scrubs are doctors, and women in scrubs are not?

I realized how entrenched this stereotype is while talking with fellow residents. Many of the women had similar stories; the men, on the other hand, were surprised. One even admitted, “That’s never happened to me.” Though this was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I have been told additional stories of male medical students outwardly garnering more respect in interdisciplinary meetings or patient-facing clinical work than their female senior residents—and even patients asking their female doctors for a cup of coffee in the morning during rounds. I expected training to be hard—but I did not think one of the challenges would be having to constantly assert that I am, in fact, a doctor.

So—does it matter? This is something I have wrestled with over time. I thought at first that these anecdotes would be material for facetious stories I would recount as time passed, though as I progressed in my training, I realized the destructive nature of these stereotypes. Comments like the one I faced, even outside of my own professional environment, undermine credibility, reinforce gender biases, and perpetuate microaggressions. Furthermore, stereotypes with the underpinning that women in medicine must be nurses dismiss the breadth of roles women hold in medicine—even outside of physicians: researchers, medical assistants, administrators, pharmacists, NPs, or PAs.

Now, when working with learners of various levels and backgrounds, I am always meticulous in asking how they would like me to handle microaggressions when we are working in a team together. This tells the learner I am privy to their inevitable nature, though I am intolerant of disrespect of members of the team I am humbled to be a part of. In turn, I hope to portray the idea that there is respect for everyone’s role on the team, regardless of their gender, background, or race. I believe that modeling this kind of professionalism helps shift the culture toward one that actively resists bias and stereotypes.

I recognize this may be a deeply embedded institutional issue, though I challenge you to reconsider those “classic” gender norms in medicine, particularly since over half of medical students are women. I hope to empower women in health care to take ownership of their titles and correct assumptions without apology, as well as encourage men in the field to continue their allyship in improving the culture of a career that can have such a permeating impact on one’s life. We all must be educators and advocates—championing health care professionals not for what they wear, but for their training, contributions, and expertise in their respective fields.

Emma Fenske is an internal medicine resident.