By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times

The idea took hold a decade ago, inside Dr. Sharona Ross’ Tampa living room.

She, along with a handful of other physicians, invited women medical residents and students to talk about their interest in the field of surgery. Ross, a surgeon who specializes in gastrointestinal procedures at AdventHealth’s Digestive Health Institute, was stunned to hear what many of them had to say.

“Everything they’d heard about surgery was negative,” she recalled. “It was aggressive to train for, and there was no time for a family or a husband. The training was very male-oriented at the time. A lot of what they were saying was true, but I was still shocked.”

The experience pushed Ross to launch the Women in Surgery Symposium, a two-day conference for female physicians, medical students and undergraduate students who have an interest in pursuing a surgical career. Over the last decade, the annual gathering has attracted hundreds of medical professionals, making it the largest event anywhere for women in surgery. Some come from as far away as Japan, Australia, Mexico and Canada.

While it was founded in Tampa Bay in 2009, the symposium has traveled to other cities. But last weekend it returned home as the surgeons convened at the Sheraton Sand Key in Clearwater.

National data confirms the gaps that Ross found locally, and they point to a much larger problem. Fifty percent of medical students in 2018 were women, but only 9 percent of female medical students pursued a career in surgery, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

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