WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN MED STUDENTS’ GRADES DEPEND ON LISTENING TO WOMEN — Broadly

With a blue paper sheet covering her pubic hair, a 30-year-old woman is lying naked from the waist down, with her legs spread open on an examination couch in a hospital room. A trainee doctor opens her vagina with a speculum and gazes inside to find the cervix.

But this is no ordinary pap smear. The woman being examined is in fact a teacher, and she’s here to show the medical student how to do a gynecological exam which is painless and stress-free for a patient—by allowing them to practise on her own body.

The University of Oxford medical school is one of several which have pioneered a groundbreaking feminist way of teaching medical undergraduates gynecology, in which women from the general public are trained to teach medical students…