Women's Dermatologic Society

An Interview with Efe Kakpovbia, MD, MSc Interviewed by Brianna Olamiju, MD and Priyanka Kumar, MD

 By Marie Leger, MD, PhD WDS News You Can Use Committee Going to medical school was an honor for me. As products of the American dream, both my sister and I went to graduate school, but the women in my family who came before us, including my mom, my grandmothers, my eight aunts, did not go to college. My mom worked as a legal secretary in San Francisco. When I think of my mom in that era, I think of Joan in Mad Men , fending off advances, clearly brilliant, navigating not just grammar and shorthand, but business decisions, personalities, and her male colleagues. When she worked in San Francisco in the 1960s and ‘70s, her law firm had 25 attorneys, all of them men, and the secretaries were all women. She says, “It was a really big deal the day my friend Pat came to work wearing pants instead of a dress, and all of the other secretaries came running down to our cubicles to observe her.” Medicine has its own version of this story. As I was interviewing for my internal medicine prelimi...