Plenty, as this study of female surgeons shows, and it is not always pretty. This is a work of scholarship, so there's a smattering of academic references and jargon, but the general reader will find great rewards in Cassell's observations of 33 women surgeons followed over a three-year period. She discovers the answers by looking not at specific incidents but at a pattern of events. She found some women to be brusque, other to be warm, and certainly does not discount the fact that male surgeons are compassionate. But, she argues, men and women are compassionate in different ways.
Men are fatherly, women are motherly.
I will spend a lot of time listening to them and talking to them about things that basically are good for them and a waste of my time. It all depends on the kind of mentoring and the attitudes of senior staff members. A surgeon's day is grueling and long and something to be bragged about. Women certainly are not allowed to show weakness. More than most other medical specialties, women surgeons feel the pressure of representing their sex and have to be better that merely adequate.