“I won’t be available for Christmas,” said my younger male colleague, “because I’ve got small children to look after.” And the other (childless) people in the room nodded wordlessly and the meeting moved along; except that my jaw had dropped like a tangerine at the bottom of a Christmas stocking. What woman, in her wildest dreams, would think of coming up with something like that, casually playing the Norman Rockwell card to a room full of exhausted, hardworking physicians veering towards a Christmas roster?  

In my intern year we had a one-in-two roster, so you either did Christmas Day or Christmas Eve and Stephen’s Day: a rock and a hard place, in other words, small child or no small child. Most junior doctors don’t have small children. Most junior doctors are women. Most women know it’s far easier to have small children in your 20s and 30s than it will be when you’re senior enough not to be on call every Christmas. But women with small children aren’t exactly flavour of the month when it comes to picking teams for surgical rotations, or for anything that involves staying up all night saving lives. Women junior doctors with small children, therefore, tend to feel that they have to try all the harder to prove themselves. 

And so women with small children tend to pretend that they don’t mind working Christmas. Volunteering for antisocial rosters proves that one is not frivolous, not lazy, nor too stupid to use contraception. Women doctors work at Christmas, at New Year’s, and usually do so without complaining, just to show that we can. If you are a woman and had made the embarrassing mistake of procreating before it became convenient for others, you make sure that your children are neither seen nor heard. 

Don’t you want a job?

I tried to imagine a female junior doctor piping up at a meeting, “Oh, I can’t work Christmas because I’ve got small children,” and felt the icy chill of the winter of her career as I mentally heard the words. Because such a woman would immediately identify herself as someone who’s going to just drop out. 

Putting it out there that you have a family that comes first and that you’d like to work around the needs of someone smaller and more vulnerable than you or your colleagues is like asking for a pay cut from the word go. You’ve identified yourself as someone who doesn’t really want a job. Mention the ‘C’ word (Christmas) and you might as well kiss your leadership options goodbye. Men can relax and enjoy Christmas; women can’t. Men can be stay-at-home dads; women can drop out and be housewives. Men can balance a career and family life. Women can juggle, try not to get pregnant before their finals, and pay someone else to raise their kids so that they can get into the breakfast meeting.

Much of the vitriol towards women who prioritise their children doesn’t come from men: it comes from other women. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Sheryl Sandberg’s favourite piece of advice to other younger women is “don’t leave before your leave”; in other words, don’t pick a career path based on the assumption that when you have children you won’t be allowed to take the time you need to spend with them, and so base your career now around the children you haven’t even yet conceived. And yet in medicine so many women base their career options around the potential Christmas roster that they will possibly have to endure 10, 15 years into the future, should they have the fortune to bear children. 

In many ways I was lucky enough to have foolishly borne two children before even becoming a registrar, and so it hadn’t occurred to me how anti-family a junior doctor job can be. But much as I love my career, and much as my identity is important to me as a physician, there are only so many years that you can seriously wave goodbye to two small, pyjama-clad persons on a Christmas doorstep, solemnly clutching toys that you won’t ever get to play with them. There are only so many cold turkeys one can endure. 

Cold turkey

My dearest friend is the daughter of a country GP who worked every single Christmas until he passed away: her abiding Christmas memories are of a hastily gobbled dinner before another house-call. Of waiting anxiously round a dwindling fire, desperate for her dad to come home from doing his rounds, before Santa Claus might come. Christmas is, of course, a pre-industrial, Dickensian feast of peace. A time to shut the shops, to close the banks and businesses, to come home, to be with loved ones and, above all, to stop working. Anachronistic, in other words, in this post-modern world. Traditionally, women in Ireland worked throughout Christmas making festive food and entertaining others, so that by January 6 they had another special day to celebrate and relax among themselves: Women’s Christmas. Oiche Nollaig na mBan. 

The average person only has 72 summers – and therefore has 72 Christmases too. Fewer than 10 of these, possibly, will contain Santa Claus. Every person with small children needs to spend time with them at Christmas. And most of these people nowadays are women.