When people ask what it is like to be a woman in interventional electrophysiology, I tell them the truth: for most of my career, I was the only one at the table. Not the only woman in the EP lab; nurses, techs, and coordinators have always been the backbone of every EP lab I have worked in, but the only woman standing in lead, with the catheters in her hands. That has changed. It has not changed enough. Cardiology remains one of the least gender-balanced fields in medicine, and the procedural subspecialties EP, interventional, structural are the narrowest part of that funnel. We are not short on talented women entering medical school. We lose them somewhere between the classroom and the lab. I have thought a lot about where that loss happens, and I no longer believe it is mostly about ability or even about ambition. It is about permission, the quiet, cumulative sense of whether a room expects you to be in it. The room does not hand you authority ... Early on, I learned th...
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