Medical Twitter Account’s Photo of 2 Kids Walking Hospital Halls Has a Lot of People Up in Arms

A photo posted on Twitter of two toddlers wearing medical scrubs had some people hot under the collar. When you look at this, we want you to judge for yourselves.

A boy dressed in green scrubs with “Doctor in Training” printed on the back is holding hands with a little girl in pink scrubs that say, “Nurse in Training”. The picture was shared by Medical Shots with a caption that read, “This is cute, isn’t it?”

That turned out to be a loaded question which lead to a barrage of comments with a response of “NO.” Many people were upset with the picture and deemed it to be sexist. They said that it upholds gender biases and stereotypes by assuming that boys are destined to be doctors while girls are not.

Some asked why the boy couldn’t be a nurse or why they both couldn’t be doctors. A few people in the thread commented that adults should not be pressuring kids into a certain profession at this age. Stats were posted on the amount of women doctors at work and a handful of doctors spoke up to say they are here, and they are female.

Those who criticized the pic have called it misogynistic, wrong, and outdated. To demonstrate their point, some even altered the photo by changing the pink and green colors to some that are gender-neutral, or by re-writing the words on the scrubs. Check out an example:

Critics of the picture have said that women who work as doctors have often been mistaken for nurses, even when standing next to a male nurse. Sometimes patients assume wrong. There were a number of people who blasted the photo as a representation of adults’ lopsided thinking.

On the other hand, there are a good number of people who did not take offense to the photo and did find it to be cute. One commenter stated that the female nurses in their family view the little girl to be the hero based on the job that nurses do. To her, this doesn’t take away from the fact that women can be doctors too and she felt that shaming the picture was an insult to nurses and girls who want to go that route.

Others chimed in saying that they could see the picture being a problem if the message being sent was saying ONLY one gender could do a particular job, versus anyone. Some simply asked the question, “What if she wants to be a nurse and he wants to be a doctor?”

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, roughly 50% of med school enrollees have been female for 2016 and 2017. Last year, the New York Times did a piece on gender equality in the nursing field, and discussed how the number of men working as nurses has increased since the 1960s. Still, they only make up about 13% of the nursing workforce in the U.S.

Twitter user @TheMedicalShots has since removed the photo since it went viral and stirred so many people up emotionally. No one from the account has responded to the blowback.

We want your thoughts on the picture. Do you feel it reinforces stereotypes about gender roles? Do you think it’s just a cute, innocent picture of a couple of toddlers? Are you bothered by the image?