Dr. Jahnavi Srinivasan grew up in El Paso, Texas, an arid climate reminiscent of her family’s roots in South India. While her father was an accomplished mathematician, she had no medical influences in her family growing up. She attended Northwestern University for a combined undergraduate/medical degree program, after which she spent two years in as a neurosurgery resident at Emory University before transferring to Emory’s General Surgery Residency Program.
Now a general surgery attending at Emory University, Dr. Srinivasan has found several niches within general surgery to excel within. Her clinical interests include complex GI and inflammatory bowel disease, and she is the current Surgical Director of the Emory Crohn’s and Colitis Center. She also takes great interest in laparoscopic technique and residency education and skill training, and has spearheaded the development of a robust simulation program as part of the Emory General Surgery Residency Program. Further, Dr. Srinivasan is involved in global surgery through the Emory Haiti Alliance, an annual Emory initiative that sends surgical teams to offer free medical attention and operations to patients at L’Hôpital Sainte-Thérèse de Hinche.
“If you do global or rural work with any consistency, there are probably more lows than highs. If you’re gratified, you’re probably not doing it hard enough or right enough, because there are so many problems that you have to address… But it’s been great in many ways – it has taught me a lot about my colleagues and what they’re capable of. Most of all, it’s made me continuously hopeful for the next generation. I think the medical students that do this are really the best we have to offer. They’re pretty impressive people.”
In this episode, Dr. Srinivasan also speaks to a phenomenon that has been borne out in medical and business literature alike, that while self-confidence in high-achieving professionals is gender-neutral, appearing self-confident and auto-promotion translates into influence much differently for men and women.
“Everyone gets stereotyped a little bit. I was always the kind of resident that was pretty outspoken, pretty business, didn’t have a hard time standing up for what my opinion was. I think, for women, that’s not always considered a flattering trait, and so I do feel, at times, that I have been delegitimized by people referring to me as being brusque or bristly in ways that they would never refer to a guy who’s similarly opinionated and decisive. In fact, I have several male faculty members who speak pretty similarly to me, but they’ve never been told in the process of advocating for a patient that there was something temperamentally incorrect with them. I have definitely been told that.
In response to being asked how women can be assertive without being labeled:
“There’s nothing wrong with being decisive and assertive. The thing that is wrong is the people that judge you for being a woman who is decisive and assertive. It’s really easy to get frustrated, and to think that you need to change something about yourself. You have to be circumspect and introspective enough to realize when you have faults that you can change. But stand strong in the things that you admire in people, men and women alike.”
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue) and Punk Rock Opera (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Punk_Rock_Opera/).