#Metoo Hospital: “I imagine her with a whip and boots”, when Agnès Buzyn was a victim of sexism from medical professors
|Un témoignage fort de l'ancienne médecin, qui fut ministre de la Santé de 2017 à 2020. Midi Libre – SYLVIE CAMBON
In a documentary broadcast this Sunday, May 5 on M6, the former Minister of Health recounts what she encountered when she became a professor of hematology, at the age of 40, at ;Necker hospital. Victim of harassment and denigration, she abandoned her job four years later.
"Being reminded of a sexual fantasy was excruciating!"While the #Metoo Hospital movement has been shaking the medical community for several weeks, former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn testifies in a documentary broadcast this Sunday, May 5 on M6, "Des blouses not so white" from the sexism and harassment situations she suffered in her career as a doctor at the public hospital.
Avant d’être ministre de la santé, Agnès Buzyn a eu une brillante carrière de médecin en hématologie à l'hôpital public. Du fait de son poste à haute responsabilité, elle va subir des violences sexistes pendant 4 ans qui vont la pousser à quitter son métier de médecin…… pic.twitter.com/UbvXC6yOQi
— M6 (@M6) April 17, 2024
"The president of the medical community said, yes, Agnès Buzyn came to see me in my office to talk to me about her candidacy for professorship. It’s funny, every time I see her come into my office, I imagine her with a whip and boots. Finally it’s incredible! Amazing! " says the hematology specialist, who became a full professor even though she had been a doctor for twenty years.
"There were 32 members, 32 men"
The day he was appointed, "I entered the room, there were 32 members, 32 men. It was 2003, I was 40 years old. It was that day that I realized the anomaly. I said to myself how is it that in a hospital group which includes the Georges Pompidou European Hospital, the Necker Hospital, the Cochin Hospital, how is it that for a commission which must identify the future managers of the hospital, how come they only found 32 men and no women? And then I understood that ;there was a serious malfunction."
"They couldn’have a woman hierarchically above them"
From then on, she will arouse the hostility of some of her colleagues. "From one day to the next, while I am the same person, as I prescribe the same things, that I do the same job as two days before, the fact of having a title drives them crazy. And all of a sudden I feel immense aggression from my colleagues, immense. In fact I felt that men could not stand having a woman hierarchically above them."
"I’was pre-suicidal"
She will then become a target, and suffer four years of harassment which will destroy her vocation. "I thought I was going to die, honestly, it was such violence, such exclusion… I was exhausted. Honestly I think that if I hadn't had children, at that time, I was really pre-suicidal, it was getting so crazy that I decided to extract myself from my job as a doctor."
Today still, recalls 70 % of active university and hospital practitioners are still men while  ;more than one in two doctors is a woman.