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Frances Conley, neurosurgeon who fought sexism in medicine, dies at 84

Dr. Conley said she was addressed as “sweetheart” and “dear” during surgeries, which she said were deliberate attempts to diminish her authority as a senior surgeon. When she expressed disagreement with a man, she was accused of being “on the wrong foot,” a reference to her menstrual cycle.

In 1991, after more than a decade and a half as a professor at Stanford and a long tenure as chief of neurosurgery at a nearby veterans hospital, Dr. Conley announced her resignation from medical school, saying she “couldn’t pretend to be one of the boys any longer.” Although she later rescinded her resignation, her move made national headlines and sparked a controversy over sexism in medical practice.

Dr. Conley, 84, died Aug. 5 at her home in Sea Ranch, California. Her death was recently announced by Stanford. She has dementia, said her nephew Ron Sann.

When Dr. When Dr. Conley was one of 12 women in a 60-person class enrolled at Stanford Medical School, the field of medicine, long open only to men, had begun to expand opportunities for women—though mostly in specialties like pediatrics rather than in the pediatric area of neurosurgery.

According to Stanford, she was one of the first women to receive residency training in neurosurgery and, in 1982, the first woman in the United States to receive tenure in the specialty.

She was particularly experienced in operations on the spine and carotid arteries, a pair of blood vessels in the neck, and conducted extensive research on immunological treatments for brain tumors. However, her skills and experience were not enough to protect her from suggestions, physical advances, derogatory comments and jokes that were more typical of a locker room than an operating room.

Once, at a weekly lunch with the surgical staff, a male colleague remarked loudly that he could see the shape of her anatomy under her white lab coat. According to her own statements, she responded with a suggestive remark to him. She sometimes joked about castration of male interns who she felt were not paying enough attention, implying that “sometimes you have to fight sexism with sexism.”

She later recalled that because she “feared banishment from the only professional camaraderie I had ever known” and “not wanting to lose my quasi-membership in the surgeon’s club, I never did anything to stop behaviors that were repugnant to me and ultimately harmful to my self-respect.”

She cited two precipitating factors for her announcement in June 1991 that she was leaving Stanford University’s medical school, with her resignation taking effect three months later.

One factor was news that the school would suspend a national search for a new chair of the department of neurosurgery and instead promote incumbent chair Gerald Silverberg, whom she called a “wonderful doctor” but who she accused of being “vile” to women “to treat.

Dr. Conley claimed that Silverberg had proposed to her, an accusation he denied. Colleagues interviewed by The Washington Post in 1991 said they had no recollection of Silverberg speaking out to Dr. Conley behaved that way, and a surgeon said she carried out a “carefully planned character assassination” of Silverberg.

Silverberg also denied allegations that he targeted Dr. Conley’s menstrual cycle related. He acknowledged that he might have addressed her as “sweetheart” but said he would stop the practice.

The second triggering event for her resignation, said Dr. Conley, was a Faculty Senate meeting where medical students voiced allegations of inappropriate behavior by professors, including an incident in which a lecturer used pictures from Playboy magazine to “spice things up.” Class.

“I suddenly realized that not much had changed,” said Dr. Conley and also noted that she felt “guilty” for enduring the sexism for so long.

Dr. Conley made her resignation and her reasons for it public, participating in national media interviews and writing in an editorial published in several newspapers that she was “tired of being treated as a less than equal person.”

The subsequent flood of reports of similar experiences in other women was “like an abscess that had been festering for years,” said Dr. Conley told Time Magazine. “It kept getting bigger. I threw a scalpel at it and opened it.”

Shortly before her resignation took effect, Dr. Conley announced she would remain on the faculty, saying the university had responded meaningfully to her concerns and that further change was more likely to occur “with me there than if I wasn’t.”

Silverberg was demoted and agreed to sensitivity training. “It was never my intention to demean or insult any woman,” he said at the time, “but I now realize that some things I said or did in jest or out of affection were taken as signs of disrespect. “

Dr. Conley resumed her career and became chair of the Faculty Senate and acting chief of staff at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Palo Alto, California. In 1998, she published her memoir, Walking Out on the Boys, in which she detailed her experiences with sexism throughout her career.

Condoleezza Rice, who was then chancellor of Stanford University and later became national security adviser and then secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said at the time that she found the book “extremely interesting and well-written.”

“She has experienced a lot, overcome a lot and is successful,” Rice added. “It’s something of a triumph.”

Frances Virginia Krauskopf was born on August 12, 1940 in Palo Alto. She spent her childhood on the Stanford campus, where her father was a professor of geochemistry. Her mother raised Dr. Conley and her siblings grew up before she became a teacher and counselor.

Dr. Conley received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford in 1962. An interviewer considering her application to the university’s medical school asked whether Dr. Conley might not be a better fit for the nursing program.

As a medical student, she recalled witnessing a male professor beat up a female student when she answered a question incorrectly. The profession of her Introduction to Surgery course—a course in which she was the only female student—proclaimed that “there are women who have completed surgical training, but there are no female surgeons.”

She remembered trying to make herself invisible in the classroom, but that she had no intention of leaving the classroom.

“I fell in love with the bright lights of the operating room, the world of sterile instruments, the drama of life and death, the actors – determined, cool under pressure, with magical hands,” she wrote.

After studying medicine in 1966, Dr. Conley completed a seven-year residency in neurosurgery. In 1986, she took a sabbatical to earn a master’s degree in management science from Stanford University.

Dr. In 1963, while studying medicine, Conley was married to Philip Conley, who had competed in the javelin throw at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and later pursued a career as a financial planner.

She was also an athlete, becoming the first official female winner of the Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco in 1971, previously open only to men. According to Stanford, she had previously won the race as “Francis,” the masculine form of her name, hiding her identity under a cloak.

Dr. Conley’s husband died in 2014. Survivors include two sisters and a brother.

In her memoirs, Dr. Conley said that although she felt “tremendous power because of my professional expertise,” she felt she had never been fully included in the surgical community and that this exclusion was her “biggest disappointment.”

“Respect and gratitude,” she wrote, “come from many of the patients I have cared for.”

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