In 1982, Frances Conley became the first female neurosurgeon to receive tenure at a U.S. medical school. Nine years later, she resigned her position after a male colleague who’d been accused of sexual harassment was named acting department chair. Pervasive sexism, Conley said, had made her job intolerable.
Photo: Stanford Medicine
“Those who now administer my work environment have never been able to accept me as a peer, not because I lack professional competence, but because I use a different bathroom,” wrote Conley in an opinion piece that ran in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere shortly after she tendered her resignation. She wrote of academic medicine’s old boys’ club mentality and sexually charged atmosphere, from gender insensitivity to blatant sexual harassment and retaliation. After the School of Medicine’s dean committed to address the issues she raised, Conley withdrew her resignation, but she continued to lecture and speak out to the media about sexism in the medical field, particularly within surgical specialties. In 1998, she chronicled her experience in a memoir, Walking Out on the Boys.
Frances K. Conley, ’62, MD ’66, MS ’86, a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, died from complications of dementia on August 5 in Sea Ranch, Calif. She was 83.
The media coverage of her resignation sparked a nationwide response from other women in medicine who had been treated similarly and ultimately led to reforms. “My experiences could not have been possible without hers,” says Stanford professor Odette Harris, MD ’96, one of the first Black female neurosurgeons in the country. “Her visibility, her accomplishments, blazed a path for us all.”
Conley was born on August 12, 1940, in Palo Alto. She grew up on the Stanford campus, one of four children of Kathryn (Gr. ’39) and Konrad Krauskopf, PhD ’39, a professor of geochemistry. She attended Bryn Mawr College for two years, then transferred to Stanford, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and remaining on the Farm for medical school and residency. Her research focused on immunotherapy for brain tumors. During a sabbatical year, in 1986, she earned a master’s in business from the Graduate School of Business. She served as chief of staff at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System from 1997 until 2000, then retired and moved with her husband to Sea Ranch, where she volunteered at the local medical clinic.
“She really wanted to change the world,” says Ron Sann, her nephew-in-law. “She wanted to show that women were intellectual peers of men. Today that might sound silly, but at the time it was considered revolutionary.”
Conley’s husband, Philip, died in 2014. She is survived by her siblings, Karen Hyde, ’61, Karl Krauskopf, and Marion Forester.
Tracie White is a senior writer at Stanford. Email her at traciew@stanford.edu.
