Learning to Overcome Barriers While Developing a Breast Oncology Career

Having proper mentors and overcoming barriers within yourself is something that Tiffany A. Traina, MD, and Sherry Shen, MD, have both learned to climb over throughout their careers. During the Breaking Barriers: Women in Oncology episode, both women in the breast oncology space mentioned how welcomed they have felt by their community, citing few significant disparities in their field.

Traina, vice chair of Outpatient Operations in the Department of Medicine, and section head of the Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Clinical Research Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), spoke about how she discovered that she needed different mentors in different areas of her life. She feels that this approach helped her become a better clinician, partner, and mother, and led her to where she is today.

Shen, an assistant attending physician at MSKCC, noted that while external barriers haven’t been experienced, she has imparted them upon herself. While it can be intimidating to unearth her voice in a room full of senior colleagues, Shen noted she is finding her way.

Transcript:

Traina:

I was fortunate to have incredible mentors who I think were “gender blind.” It was more about helping to nurture and educate and being excited about introducing the field of oncology to someone. I always felt well supported and recognized that I needed different mentors for different parts of my personal and professional development. There were [mentors] who were incredibly helpful for my academic development. There were colleagues who were incredibly helpful for me to figure out how to juggle life as a physician, a partner, and a mom. I don’t think that I felt barriers ever, I just recognized that it took a tremendous amount of support, and mentorship to get where I am.

Shen:

Fortunately, our field has changed so much, and especially the environment we’re working in here has been so welcoming that I don’t think I felt so much external barriers as perhaps internal barriers. Some of the ways we as women grow up and are raised, I think I have some things that I’ve struggled with, like speaking up in meetings where I felt like my expertise as a junior faculty attending was not at the level where I had a meaningful contribution to make, for example. That’s something I’m working on, internally, and over time [I am] becoming more confident speaking up. Those are the barriers that I’ve encountered.