Transcript

Dr. Iris Romero 

So, my name is Iris Romero. I'm an OBGYN at the University of Chicago. And I spend part of my time taking care of patients delivering babies and doing regular OBGYN stuff like birth control. During my life, I've also had times where I had a very active research lab, where I studied ovarian cancer. I don't do that as much anymore. But the other thing I spend a lot of my time right now doing is administration. So, that's more sort of the business side of healthcare. I’m making sure we have enough doctors, research buildings, and infrastructure to support healthcare at the University of Chicago. 

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Anya Sun 

That's really cool. So, what made you choose this specific career path? 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

So, when I was in high school, I knew that I liked healthcare, and I liked science. I knew I didn't really like humanities, and that I hated English and reading, you know. I liked history, but I couldn't really see what kind of job that would be. So, in high school, I knew I wanted to work in healthcare, and I was getting a certificate to be a nursing assistant. No one in my family had gone to college before, so my aspirational goal was maybe I could work as a nursing assistant in a hospital or in a nursing home.  

And at that time, when I was getting that certificate, the nurse that taught my class told me, “Iris, you're really smart and you're good at this stuff. Have you ever thought about being a doctor?” And I was like, “No, Nurse McKnight. I have never thought about being a doctor.” I wasn't even thinking about going to college, but her believing in me and planting that seed then really started the train down the path.  

From that moment in my senior year in high school, I was like, “I really want to be a doctor.” So, then I really worked hard in college as pre-med and then the whole path down. Once I was a doctor, I realized a couple things.  

One, I wanted to be a kind of doctor where I felt like I could help students, who were on a similar trajectory to me, fulfill their dreams. I wanted to be the kind of doctor where you could do a lot of different things in your career. A lot of my other friends who are doctors have really great careers that they love, but they basically do the same 10 or 20 things for 20 or 30 years and then they retire, and they love it. They love their patients. But I kind of get a little bit bored and I want to keep trying new things. So, I’m a doctor in a university, and I get to do a lot of different things. 

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Anya Sun 

That's really cool. So, were there any, like specific moments in your career that really kind of inspired you or motivated you to keep going? 

Dr. Iris Romero 

Yeah. Nurse McKnight, was someone that I really, really thought was the grooviest chick. I was just like, “Oh my God, you're a real nurse, and you're so smart. And so, you just know everything about medicine.” And then her thinking that I could do something similar was a really important moment for me.  

And then once I started being more involved in healthcare, I saw patients who had similar experiences to me growing up. For example, we didn't have health insurance when I was growing up. So, if you got sick, that could be the difference between buying groceries or going to get a strep throat test. And so, when I was actually in healthcare taking care of patients that had really limited resources, financially, or with language barriers, health insurance barriers, those sorts of things also really motivated me to keep going. I really wanted to be in a position to give back to these communities as a doctor. Even when I'm like, “I don't want to do this anymore. I just got to a C on the general chemistry test in college,” or, “Oh my God, med school is four years, and I'm going to be too far in debt,” shifting back to what I call the North Star and saying, “Why am I doing this?” I'm doing this for kids who are like me, so they can see people like them doing it. I'm doing it for patients who come from neighborhoods like mine and families like mine, so they can have people that take care of them. You have to have that North Star for whatever you're doing. Because sometimes, it's just really, really hard and you just feel like, “Never mind, I don't want to do this anymore.” 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, that's really inspiring. So, I know you kind of mentioned Nurse McKnight, but were there any other specific people or mentors that made a significant impact on you? 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

Oh yeah, for sure. I feel like in my life, there were two kinds of people. There were people who pushed me forward and were like the wind behind my back helping me, and then there were people that were really like the wind in front of my face, pushing me back. So, I'll tell you about both because I think we sometimes mainly concentrate on the people who helped us along the way, but it's important to acknowledge, as a high school student and a college student, that sometimes people are, for all the complicated reasons in life, not there to help you. And you have to prevail even though they're there.  

So, first I'll start with people that helped me. Nurse McKnight in high school because I wasn't even going to go to college, but she told me I could and no one else had ever said that to me.  

Two, college was really hard for me. I didn't understand entirely why college was so hard for me, and why it looked like it was so much easier for other people. But now I realize, like, the high school I went to, wasn't really preparing us to go to college. There's a lot of, like, unwritten rules of college and life in general that if your parents had gone to college or you spent more time in those environments, it wouldn't feel so foreign. But in college, I had a couple people who really helped me up.  

One was like a dean of students who would let me come talk to him and advise me. Like, I needed to get into a summer program to take the MCAT, which is the test to go to medical school. And it was a summer program in New Orleans that helped you get ready for that test. And when I first applied, they didn't accept me. And then I'm literally sitting in Dr. Coleman’s office and he's like, “Show me the rejection letter,” and he, like, picks up his phone and calls the person in charge of the thing. And he's like, “Yeah, you guys got this totally wrong. She's going to be an amazing doctor, and you really need to reconsider.” And just like using his sort of capital, as they call it, to help me. They let me in and you know, obviously I got into medical school. So, Doctor Coleman. 

Then, I have a calculus teacher. Calculus was really hard for me. And the thing with pre-med is you have to have a really good GPA to get into medical school. So, even if you get a C in calculus, that could really be the difference between going to medical school or not. And I was just really bad at calculus, but this professor would just let me sit in his office over and over again and teach me over and over again how to do the problem. I remember even once, like he and his wife had me over for dinner, and he helped me get through a homework set. And I think in the end, like he really made the difference between getting a B and a C. And so, there were, like, a handful of people along the way who really invested in me and helped me along realizing that potentially, there weren’t any other resources in my life. Like, I couldn't just go ask my dad to help me with my calculus homework. He owned Auto Body Shop. He could help me, like, paint my car, but not do calculus homework.  

And then the other version of people that young people encounter are people who have a preconceived notion of what you should be and what you have the capacity to do. And I had that in high school. I don't think they do this to you guys anymore, but when I was in high school, you took a test and it told you what you should be when you grow up, based on how you answered these questions. That test said that I should be a librarian or a clergy person, like a priest or pastor or something. And so, the high school counselors sort of locked onto that and they're like, “You don't have to worry about going to college. This test says you should be these things.” Or when I took the ACT, I didn't do that well in high school on the first try. And then the college counselors were like, “No, you shouldn't try again. That's just a reflection of how smart you are. This is a national test. It's just saying your capacity and how smart you are. And so, you don't need to try again. This just means that you either shouldn't be thinking about going to or college, or you should go maybe to a Community College.”  

Then the same thing happened in college with the pre-Med office. They were like, “We don't really think your doctor material, you should have a Plan B. Maybe you could be like a high school biology teacher or something like that.” And so that happened a whole bunch of times in my life, and even still happens to me today.  

People have decided what certain people can be. If someone's giving me feedback that I can use, I take it. If the calculus teachers like, “You really didn't study enough last weekend,” then I accept that, and I'll take that. But if they're just saying, “People like you can't be people like that,” I call BS on that. I don't know what that means. There's nothing objective in there. And so, I find those people just as motivating as the people who are cheering you on. I’ve been motivated to show that high school career counselor that she was absolutely wrong and to show the pre-Med office and my college that they don't know who can be a doctor and who can't be a doctor. So, they motivate me too. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah, that sounds like a challenging experience. And that kind of overlapped with my next question, but like, what other adversities have you faced specifically because of your gender or background? 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

Yeah. So, I think background wise, it's been hard not having any sort of safety net financially at different times in my life. So, when you become a doctor you go to college, then you go to Med school, and then you do this thing called residency. It's like on-the-job training. It depends what kind of doctor you're going to be, but you work a lot of hours. And they don't pay you very much. And so, it's a very stressful time in your life financially. So, if something like your car breaks, or your laptop breaks, or you have to have a root canal and it costs $3000. You're living on such a small income. Those were sort of hard times in my life because there wasn't anyone to call. I can't be like, “Hey, mom. I need $3000 for root canal.” I just had to figure it out and spend less money or put it on a credit card and then accumulate credit card debt. So, not having a financial safety net was problematic.  

My kids now, I have teenagers, are not living the same life experiences that I did. And I feel very blessed to be able to help them, but I also want them to very much understand and not take that for granted because not everybody has that. So, I'd say that was a challenge in terms of background. 

In terms of gender, I think the biggest challenge is still pervasive gender stereotypes about how women are and preconceived notions about women. So, you could walk into a science lab, for example, your general chemistry lab, your freshman year of college, and you'll have four people in your lab group. There's going to be some preconceived notions about who's going to be good at doing the lab homework and who's not. And it's usually, you know, that a woman of color or minority woman, I'm Hispanic, is not going to be the one. So, you're already starting with those preconceived notions of who you are. And so, you have to work twice as hard to prove them wrong. At the same time, you kind of feel that way yourself too. Like, “I'm probably not going to be that good at this lab,” because we have this imposter syndrome. So, it's sort of this vicious circle of your own self esteem that's reinforced by what people think of you based on your gender or race.  

And the other thing about being a woman in this stage of my career, is these kind of preconceived notions about how women should act in terms of like, “we should be nice” and “we should smile.” And if a man acts a certain way, he's a strong leader and decisive. And if a woman acts a similar way, then she's difficult to work with, and she's cold, and she has sharp elbows. So, there's still very much a double standard for which behaviors are valued in men and penalized in women. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. So, that also like kind of goes with my next question, but what do you perceive to be the largest barrier or obstacle to like female leadership or just girls becoming leaders? 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

Well, that's an interesting one. There are two things. One, I think you do still have to work a little bit harder to sort of overcome all the implicit bias for people to give you a chance. It's sort of a secret power though, because I found in my life that people have such low expectations of my capacity that when they do give me a chance, it's very easy to impress the hell out of them because they expected so little to begin with. So, I feel like once the door is open, if you're like a strong committed woman who is like dedicated to doing the best job possible, once you get on the other side of the door, I feel like there's a lot less headwind.  

But the reverse of that coin is also having women understand that at some point, it can just be good enough. I feel like women, especially minority women, constantly feel like they always have to be striving for more. Like, I'm going to go get into college, then I'm going to get into Med school, then I'm going to be the boss of this, the boss of that, the boss of that. It's also OK to just say, “Hey, I want to be a really good OBGYN and that's going to be fulfilling.” Or, you know, “Hey, I want to be a great biology teacher.” It's OK to also stop striving at some point. But not for you guys because you have your whole life ahead of you; you have to strive, strive, strive right now. But at some point, I think there's a narrative that's sort of imposed upon some women that you need to always try to get to the next stage, which can become really debilitating after you're already like 50 years old, and you’re still trying to get to something else. It's OK to just be like, “I did it, and now I'm going to keep doing it and enjoy it.” 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. So, why do you think that diversity in the workplace is important and in particular, gender diversity? 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

Yeah, I think that diversity and gender diversity, especially in a workplace, is really important because in things like healthcare and science, we have really complicated problems to solve. And you really cannot solve complicated problems without innovation, and you cannot get innovation if everybody's looking at the problem from the same sort of perch. And our live life experiences are what give us that nuanced understanding of what's contributing to a problem, and therefore, what could be a solution. So, if everybody is the exact same, like all white men, trying to solve really complex problems in healthcare, the progress in general for our whole sort of community is going to be slower than getting a lot of different perspectives on the problem. From women, to minorities, to gay people, transgender people, poor people, rich people, etc.  

If we want things to go faster and be more impactful, we have to have more people looking at the problem. We honestly can't afford to keep doing it the same way. The problems in the world and in healthcare and science are just too big. Like global warming, the pandas, you know, we can't tolerate going as slow as we've had the luxury of going. Like for your generation, the problems are going to be even bigger and more urgent. And so, we have to have more diverse perspectives. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. So, diversity gives you a lot of different perspectives which helps you accelerate the speed at which you solve the problem? 

Dr. Iris Romero 

100% percent, yeah.

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Anya Sun 

OK, so how has your ability to respond to comments undermining your abilities changed as you've gotten more experience? 

Dr. Iris Romero 

So, it's sort of ironic that as you get more experience, you get less comments that undermine your capacity. But when you're young, you have the most comments coming your way, but you have the least amount of self-esteem and life experience to navigate those comments.  

So, I think I did it terribly when I was young. One that stuck with me for a lot of years was as I was interviewing for something early on like a scholarship or maybe it was to get into Med school, the comments are always like just enough where you're like, “That felt awful and weird,” but not like enough where you're like, “Oh, you cannot say that to me.” But they said something like, “I'm surprised how smart you are given how pretty you are.” And this is in the early 90s, and I'm sure your generation would be like, “Oh no, that's a terribly egregious comment,” but this is in the 1990s, so it would be different. But it's just that level where you're like, “I really need the scholarship from you, and that felt a little bit weird." And so, I probably just laughed it off and then changed the subject, you know.  

I think part of the journey is understanding at what level you can self-advocate. What do you need from that person, and what is the line that you, personally, will not let cross? But as a trajectory of growing up, you have to adjust that line. I have teenage daughters, so I know they're like social justice warriors. In theory, they would never let all these things happen. But in reality, someday they're going to be applying for a job and someone's going to say, “You should smile more. You're prettier when you smile.” Are they really going to put that job on the line to call that person out and be like, "That's a very gender biased statement and you should be measuring me on my qualifications.” 

On the other hand, I totally trust that your generation is going to not let lines be crossed that prior generations have been crossed, which were 100% egregious and intolerable. But it's more microaggressions and implicit biases. I think the irony is they get less the further you go on in your career, and at the same time, your capacity to manage them gets higher. So, it's a really hard part of being young.  

Anya Sun 

OK, so, what traits do you have that help you deal with the adversity of being a woman in, like these male dominated fields? And also, how would you suggest someone cultivate these traits? 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

Yeah. So, one, I don't try to act like a man. So, I have a lot of imposter syndrome, but one of the things I won't do to overcome my imposter syndrome is trying to mimic the behavior that I see other people do. And the reason I don't do that is because it just takes a lot of energy to do this code switching. I spent so much of my life trying to just come out as gay and live in my skin as a Latina and a woman. That took all my energy, and I don't have any left to sort of pretend I'm something that I'm not.  

Two, I'm always trying to be really authentic, and lead with kindness. And so, it's just my personality. It's not really that hard for me to do, but it's pretty inefficient. A lot of people are like, “It's so much faster if you're a boss lady to just go tell everybody what to do and then you won't have to spend all this energy trying to get people to agree with what you want to do, and be your friend, and like you.” And I agree, it takes a lot of energy, and it seems like it takes longer sometimes to be kind and authentic and try to make it a win-win situation for everyone. But it lasts longer, so it's better to spend the energy upfront. And then whatever project you're working on, because you were very careful to tending to it upfront, will last. Whereas if you just bulldoze your way through and force everybody to follow you, then like in six months or a year, they'll either quit or they'll sabotage it from the inside, and it won't work. Anyway, those are sort of my two leadership tidbits. 

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Anya Sun 

Yeah. And then just for our final question, what's some advice that you would give to other women who want to enter your career field? 

Dr. Iris Romero 

Yeah, I would say definitely do it. Science and medicine, all of STEM, is incredibly gratifying for two reasons. One, it's a field that's always intellectually satisfying because STEM changes really fast. In 1990, when I was a college student, like that's in the history books of science now. And because the fields change so fast, you'll always be learning and contributing to something more. It's one of the fields that almost grabs your hand; you're giving back to society or to the community. I know I'm biased, like I have a best friend who's like a history professor, but I'm always like, “What can you walk away with and say at the end of this year, you know, like I had this impact in a community or on a person.” So, you can almost hold the level of impact in your hand, and that's what keeps you sustained through your career. 

I would say not to be afraid of feeling like you're not smart enough, because guess what, the secret is that nobody is smart enough and other people are just better at thinking they're smart enough. But they're not smarter than you.  

I would not be afraid of how long it takes, because what I tell people now is like, “Your life's going to pass, no matter what you're doing, you might as well do something that you're really, really excited about and that aligns with what's important to you.” So, it doesn't matter if you go to college for four years or you go to grad school for eight years. Either way, eight years are going to pass.  

And then three, for people who grew up poor like me, I also really emphasize, like, don't get too worried about the money part because these jobs pay well. So, even if you have to take out student loans for college or you become an engineer and you're like, “Oh, I'm going to be $100,000 in debt at the end of this.” That sounds like it might as well be $1,000,000 because your family makes, you know, $30,000 a year, and your parents are like, “That is so much money; that's more money than what 3 generations of our family makes.” But the jobs pay so well in the end. Compared to jobs the Community College English teacher, the amount of money that person can make is so much less than someone in STEM, so it wouldn't be a problem. And then there's loan repayments. Like I was very, very in debt when I came out of medical school, but I was able to get a loan repayment as part of the work that I was doing when I first became a doctor. That paid off almost all of my loans. So, don't be afraid of the money, don't be afraid of the time, and never think that you're not smart enough because you are. 

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Anya Sun 

Ok, thank you. And that's like all the questions that I have for today. Thank you so much for meeting with me. 

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Dr. Iris Romero 

You're welcome. Good luck everybody. 

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