By Emily Langer The Washington Post

Updated September 28, 2024, 3:53 p.m.

For Frances Conley, one of the first women to join the elite ranks of neurosurgeons, her profession was one of awe-inspiring power. “A paralyzed patient walks, a mute stroke patient talks, a tumor patient borrows extra time,” she once wrote. “This was what I wanted to do with my life.”

But when she entered the field in the 1960s as a medical student at Stanford University, where she later became a tenured professor, she found medicine to be a world where women were often relegated to subservient roles, no matter their abilities, and subjected to flagrant sexism and in some cases sexual harassment.

Male physicians groped female colleagues after they scrubbed in for surgery, knowing that the women could not resist without risking the contamination of their hands.

Dr. Conley said she was addressed as “honey” and “dear” during operations in what she characterized as deliberate attempts to diminish her authority as the presiding surgeon. If she expressed disagreement with a man, she said, she was accused of being “on the rag,” a reference to her menstrual cycle.

Get Starting Point

A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Dr. Conley, 84, died Aug. 5 at her home in Sea Ranch, Calif. Her death was recently announced by Stanford. She had dementia, said her nephew Ron Sann.

When Dr. Conley enrolled at Stanford medical school as one of 12 women in a class of 60, the medical field, long open only to men, had begun to broaden opportunities for women - but mainly in specialties such as pediatrics, and not in the field of neurosurgery.

She became one of first women to be board certified in neurosurgery and, in 1982, was the first woman in the United States to be awarded tenure in that specialty, according to Stanford.

She was especially skilled at surgeries on the spine and the carotid arteries, a pair of blood vessels in the neck, and conducted extensive research on immunological treatments for brain tumors. Her ability and experience was not enough, however, to shield her from what she described as propositions, physical advances, belittling comments and banter more stereotypical of a locker room than an operating room.

On one occasion, at a weekly luncheon with surgical staff, a male colleague loudly commented that he could see the shape of her anatomy underneath her white medical coat. She replied, by her own account, with a lewd remark directed at him. She sometimes joked about castration with male surgical residents whom she considered insufficiently attentive, suggesting that “sometimes you have to fight sexism with sexism.”

Fearing “banishment from the only professional camaraderie I had ever known,” she later recalled, and “not wanting to lose my quasi-membership in the surgeons’ club, I had never done anything to stop behavior that was repulsive to me and ultimately damaging to my self-respect.”

She cited two precipitating factors for her announcement in June 1991 that she would leave the Stanford medical faculty, with her resignation to take effect three months later.

One factor was the news that the school would suspend a national search for a new neurosurgery department chairman and instead promote the acting chairman, Gerald Silverberg, whom she described as a “wonderful physician” but accused of treating women “abominably.”

Dr. Conley alleged that Silverberg had propositioned her, an accusation that he denied. Colleagues interviewed by The Washington Post in 1991 said they had no recollection of Silverberg engaging in such behavior toward Dr. Conley, and one surgeon said that she had carried out a “carefully planned character assassination” of Silverberg.

Silverberg also denied charges that he had made references to Dr. Conley’s menstrual cycle. He conceded that he might have addressed her as “honey” but said that he would stop the practice.

The second precipitating event for her resignation, Dr. Conley said, was a meeting of the faculty senate in which medical students aired allegations about inappropriate behavior by professors, including one incident in which a lecturer used images from Playboy magazine to “spice up” the class.

“I suddenly realized that things had not changed much,” Dr. Conley said, also remarking that she felt “guilty” for having put up with the sexism as long as she had.

Dr. Conley went public with her resignation and her reasons for it, sitting for interviews with the national media and writing in an op-ed published in multiple newspapers that she was “tired of being treated as less than an equal person.”

The subsequent outpouring of reports of similar experiences among other women was “like an abscess that has been festering for years,” Dr. Conley told Time magazine. “It’s been getting bigger and bigger. What I did was throw a scalpel at it and opened it.”

Shortly before her resignation became effective, Dr. Conley announced that she would remain on the faculty, saying that the university had undertaken a meaningful response to her concerns and that more change was more likely to come “if I’m around than if I’m not.”

Silverberg was demoted and agreed to undergo sensitivity training. “It was never my intention to demean or insult any woman,” he said at the time, “but it is now clear to me that some things I said or did in jest or from affection were taken as signs of disrespect.”

Dr. Conley resumed her career, becoming the chairwoman of the faculty senate and acting chief of staff of the veteran’s hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. In 1998, she published a memoir, “Walking Out on the Boys,” detailing her experiences of sexism in her career.

Condoleezza Rice, who was then Stanford University provost and later became national security adviser and then secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said at the time that she found the book “extremely interesting and well written.”

“She’s encountered a lot, she’s dealt with a lot and she’s prospered,” Rice added. “It’s something of a triumph.”

Frances Virginia Krauskopf was born in Palo Alto on Aug. 12, 1940. She spent her childhood on the Stanford campus, where her father was a professor of geochemistry. Her mother raised Dr. Conley and her siblings before becoming a teacher and counselor.

Dr. Conley received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford in 1962. An interviewer considering her application to the university’s medical school asked if Dr. Conley was perhaps not better suited to the nursing program.

As a med student, she recalled, she witnessed a male professor spank a female student when she incorrectly answered a question. The profession of her “Introduction to Surgery” course - a class in which she was the only female student - announced that “there are women who have finished surgical training, but there are no women surgeons.”

She recalled trying to make herself invisible in the classroom, but that she had no intention of leaving.

“I fell in love with the bright lights of the operating theater, the world of sterile instruments, the drama of life and death, the actors - decisive, cool under pressure, with magic hands,” she wrote.

After receiving her medical degree in 1966, Dr. Conley completed a seven-year neurosurgery residency. She took a sabbatical to receive a master’s degree in management science from Stanford in 1986.

Dr. Conley was married during medical school, in 1963, to Philip Conley, who had competed in the javelin throw at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and later pursued a career as a financial planner.

She, too, was an athlete and in 1971 became the first official female winner of the Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco, which had previously been open only to men. According to Stanford, she had earlier won the race competing as “Francis,” the male form of her name, and concealing her identity with an overcoat.

Dr. Conley’s husband died in 2014. Survivors include two sisters and a brother.

In her memoir, Dr. Conley wrote that while she experienced “tremendous power as a result of my professional competence,” she felt she had never been fully welcomed into the fraternity of surgeons and that this exclusion had been her “greatest disappointment.”

“Respect and gratitude,” she wrote, “come from many patients I have cared for.”