Yumiko Kadota was every Asian parents’ dream: model student, top of her class in medical school and on track to becoming a surgeon. A self-confessed workaholic, she regularly put ‘knife before life’, knowing it was all going to be worth it because it would lead to her longed-for career.
But if the punishing hours in surgery weren’t hard enough, she also faced challenges as a young female surgeon navigating a male-dominated speciality. She was regularly left to carry out complex procedures without senior surgeons’ oversight; she was called all sorts of things, from ‘emotional’ to ‘too confident’; and she was expected to work a relentless on-call roster - sometimes seventy hours a week or more - to prove herself.
Eventually it was too much and Yumiko quit.
Emotional Female is her account of what it was like to train in the Australian public hospital system, and what made her walk away.