Her aunt, Barbara Matthews, a pioneering child play therapist who first inspired her to see healthcare as a career, and her mother, Sandra Cubitt, an accomplished educator, who coached her to pursue her aspirations and to love learning – to build it into her daily routine and to go running to get out and blow off frustrations.
‘To the annoyance of everyone I’ve ever met, I constantly ask questions,’ she says. She credits her mother with this curiosity. ‘When I was about 16, my mother pointed out that if I really wanted to get into medical school, I would need to make a more directed effort at actually learning how to learn’. ‘I discovered then that learning is really hard, but luckily Mum also taught me to love the process of learning’.
In 2015 Mya’s fastidious approach to learning was rewarded with the Buchanan Prize as the candidate who achieved the highest score in the Fellowship Clinical Examination.
Balance for better
Mya is hesitant about the word ‘balance’. She doesn’t think it reflects reality. Instead Mya likes to describe peaks and troughs of effort towards areas of life.
‘To be a FACEM, you will at times need to focus effort towards work. This inevitably means there will be a trough in effort focused at your personal life. But other times, the focus required at work will trough for a bit and you can peak in your personal life again. To peak and trough through life is absolutely OK.
‘I think people need to have that permission. To recognise it isn’t possible to focus effort on every aspect of your life all the time, and that is ok.’
She talks, with some humour, about finding out she was having twins.
‘That was an unintentional, unexpected, peak of effort in my personal life. I didn’t know how I was going to cope, and for a long time I struggled.’
Mya sought professional help to cope with the idea of having twins – the changes it meant for her life and the possibility that it might affect her opportunities to work.
‘I really struggled with my confidence,’ Mya says.
Pursuing a Master’s in Trauma helped her address that. ‘I did it online and people told me I was crazy, that I didn’t have the time. They were right, but I needed to do that course. It gave me the confidence I needed to get back into work again. It helped pull me back in.’
She talks about this concept of push and pull and says women are often disadvantaged by the imbalance in this unspoken culture in medicine.
‘Careers are a series of pushes and pulls out of or into the workforce. We [women] have more pushes and pulls out and less pushes and pulls in and up into leadership roles. You need to align yourself with someone to pull you in and up, and women often lack that.’
The factors pushing and pulling women out of medicine include discrimination or harassment and their roles as caregivers within their family. Mya’s husband took six months off as a registrar to look after their first child and pushed her back into the workforce full-time. That same opportunity did not exist after the birth of their twins, by which time her husband was a consultant.
Mya felt lucky to have a senior female colleague to pull her back in.
‘She advocated for me and made space for me to be back in the workplace. Not all women have this.’
Mya wants this to change and speaks of the many advocates for diversity1,2,3,4 in healthcare. We all need to find opportunities to give affirmations to women, to make space in leadership and participation safe for women and other diverse groups.
‘As a registrar, I was lucky to have a female director. She took me out for coffee. I don’t know why, or even how she found the time, but it was so important. So affirming.’
ACEM invited Mya Cubitt to the College in celebration of International Women’s Day. Mya was a member of its Discrimination, Bullying, Sexual Harassment and Harassment Working Group and is a member of its Advancing Women in Emergency Section and Health Systems Reform Committee.
1 Advancing Women in Emergency Section
2 NoWEM
3 FemInEM
4 Stanford Grand Round, Esther Choo
