“Yes, I’m a Future Forensic Pathologist, and I Love Pink” - Reclaiming Femininity

When I tell people I’m pursuing a career in forensic pathology, they often expect a certain image: serious, stoic, maybe even a bit intimidating. They picture neutral colors, sharp edges, and a person who has traded softness for strength. What surprises them most is when I say I love pink. Yes, pink—the color so often dismissed as frivolous, childish, or weak. But for me, loving pink isn’t a quirky detail or a contradiction. It’s a choice. It’s a declaration that femininity and excellence can coexist in the same body, in the same room, in the same profession. It’s a reminder that I don’t have to flatten myself to be taken seriously.

In fields like medicine, especially in spaces touched by death, trauma, and high-stakes responsibility, women have fought hard to be recognized as capable. And because that recognition has been so hard-won, there can be an unspoken pressure to “earn” respect by looking and acting a certain way. To be polished but not “too” feminine. To be confident but not “too” expressive. To be strong, but never soft. Sometimes professionalism gets confused with neutrality, as if competence comes in one approved aesthetic: muted tones, minimal emotion, no visible personality.

I understand why that pressure exists. When the bar keeps moving, you learn to anticipate judgment before it arrives. You learn how quickly people attach meaning to your appearance; how a lipstick shade can become a statement about seriousness, how a skirt can be read as naivety, how a warm voice can be mistaken for uncertainty. And when you’re entering a field that demands credibility, it can feel safer to blend in. But I don’t want to build my career on the constant negotiation of my own identity...because competence does not have a look. Intelligence does not come in one uniform. A steady hand doesn’t require a hard exterior. Softness does not cancel out ambition; it can sharpen it. It can make you attentive, humane, and resilient in ways that matter deeply. In forensic pathology, you are trusted with the stories people can no longer tell for themselves. That work requires rigor, yes - but it also requires care. It requires the ability to look unflinchingly at what is difficult while still remembering that every case is a person, loved by someone, missed by someone. If anything, the ability to hold both steadiness and tenderness is a strength, not a liability.

Femininity, whatever it looks like for each person, should not be treated as something to outgrow in order to be respected. Femininity is not weakness. It is not incompetence. It is not a costume you put on when it’s convenient and remove when you want to be taken seriously. It can be joy. It can be artistry. It can be confidence. It can be power.

So when I wear pink or embrace traditionally feminine things, I’m not asking anyone to underestimate me. I’m daring them not to. I’m saying: I can be meticulous and compassionate. I can love beauty and still be brilliant. I can be gentle and still unshakable. I can honor the parts of myself that the world tries to trivialize, and still walk into a room knowing I belong there.

For me, reclaiming femininity in a serious career is about freedom. The freedom to be whole. The freedom to stop performing a version of professionalism that requires me to disappear. The freedom to be fully seen, even when that visibility feels risky. Because the truth is, the most powerful thing I can do is show up as myself: capable, curious, disciplined, and unapologetically feminine. Not despite my ambition, but alongside it.

Femininity and Competence Can Coexist

There’s a persistent stereotype that “serious” careers, especially in medicine, require women to sand down anything visibly feminine in order to be respected. The message isn’t always blunt, but it’s consistent: be smaller, be quieter, be less noticeable. I’ve heard it in different forms: “Tone down your style,” “Pink is distracting,” “You’ll be taken more seriously if you look more neutral.” Comments like these aren’t really about color palettes or lipstick. They’re about control, about who gets to be seen as credible, and what we’re expected to give up to earn that credibility.

Underlying all of it is the same assumption: that competence has a uniform. And that uniform is often bland, rigid, and masculine-coded: minimal, muted, and carefully stripped of personality. Femininity, on the other hand, gets treated like decoration: optional at best, unprofessional at worst. As if being visually feminine automatically means being less intelligent, less capable, less disciplined. But competence isn’t an aesthetic. It’s not a blazer. It’s not neutral nails. It’s not the absence of pink.

Competence is skill, knowledge, judgment, and consistency. It’s how you think under pressure. It’s how you communicate, how you learn, how you lead, how you own your mistakes, and how you show up for the people who rely on you. It’s the hours you put in when no one is watching. It’s the integrity behind your decisions. None of that changes based on whether you wear mascara or a bright scrub cap. And reducing professionalism to “looking neutral” doesn’t protect the workplace. It just reinforces the idea that women must disguise themselves to be taken seriously.

If anything, embracing femininity can be a form of strength because it requires certainty. It’s easy to blend in. It’s harder to be visibly yourself in environments where you know you may be judged for it. When you feel authentic, when you’re not constantly monitoring how you’re coming across, you can put that mental energy where it belongs. Confidence isn’t only built through achievement; it’s also built through alignment, through the quiet relief of not performing a version of yourself that was designed to make other people comfortable.

I’ve seen this in real life. I’ve met women in medicine who wear bright colors, jewelry, bows, long nails, bold lipstick, or soft curls, not to seek attention, but because it’s how they feel like themselves. They walk into rooms with authority. They teach, publish, lead rounds, run teams, advocate for patients, and make difficult calls. Their femininity doesn’t dilute their expertise; it sits alongside it. It doesn’t make them less commanding; it often makes them more memorable, more approachable, more human.

The truth is, professionalism should be measured by behavior, not by how closely a woman’s appearance resembles an originally masculine template. The goal shouldn’t be to look like competence. The goal should be to "be competent" while still being allowed to be a full person.

And for women who love feminine expression, reclaiming that space isn’t superficial. It’s a statement, "I will not trade my identity for legitimacy. I can be both: soft and serious, feminine and formidable, and I shouldn’t have to choose."

Softness Does Not Cancel Out Ambition

There’s a common misconception that being soft or gentle means you must be passive, fragile, or lacking ambition. As if tenderness automatically cancels out drive. And in "serious" careers, this misunderstanding can be suffocating for women, because ambition is still too often translated as sharpness: speak louder, take up space in a harder way, be tougher, be less emotional. The implication is clear: if you want to be respected, you have to prove you’re not soft.

I want to challenge that. Not by arguing that toughness doesn’t matter, it does, but by redefining what strength can look like. Because softness and ambition aren’t opposites. They can coexist. In fact, together they form a kind of power that is steady, grounded, and deeply effective.

Softness, at its best, is not weakness; it’s emotional intelligence. It’s empathy, patience, self-awareness, and the ability to read a room without shrinking in it. It’s the choice to respond with care instead of ego. It’s communication that doesn’t wound. It’s resilience that doesn’t need to be loud. In medicine, these traits aren’t optional “nice-to-haves.” They affect everything: how patients experience care, how teams function under stress, how conflict gets resolved, and how trust is built. A clinician who can be both clinically competent and emotionally attuned doesn’t just treat conditions...they treat people. Ambition, on the other hand, is the engine. It’s the desire to master a craft, to keep learning, to do better than yesterday. It’s discipline when motivation fades. It’s setting high standards and refusing to coast. Ambition is what pushes you toward specialization, research, leadership, and excellence. It’s the willingness to carry responsibility and to keep showing up even when the work is heavy.

When you combine softness with ambition, you don’t become less formidable; you become more complete. You get a leadership style that is decisive without being cruel, confident without being arrogant, and driven without being disconnected. You can hold people accountable while still treating them with dignity. You can be firm and compassionate in the same sentence. You can pursue excellence without losing your humanity along the way.

Forensic pathology is a perfect example to me of why this balance matters. People often assume the work requires emotional detachment, as if care would get in the way of clarity. But meticulous work and compassion are not competing forces. Imagine a forensic pathologist who approaches every case with precision, careful documentation, relentless attention to detail, the humility to double-check and keep learning. That’s ambition in action. But they also understand what a case represents: not an object, not a puzzle, but a person. Someone who was loved. Someone whose family may be waiting for answers that will change the rest of their lives.

Their softness shows up in the way they speak to investigators, in how they write with respect, in the way they hold space for grief without absorbing it as their own. It shows up in the recognition that truth-telling is, in itself, a form of care. And their ambition ensures they give that truth the highest standard of work they can offer.

That isn’t a contradiction. That’s the job done well.

Softness doesn’t mean you can’t handle difficult things. Sometimes softness is how you handle them, with steadiness, with integrity, with compassion that doesn’t collapse under pressure. And ambition doesn’t have to turn you into someone hard. It can simply make you someone committed.

We need more women, and more people, period, who model this: that you can be gentle and still relentless about your goals. You can be kind and still powerful. You can be soft and still unshakably serious about your work. In medicine, in forensic pathology, and in life, that balance isn’t just possible. It’s necessary.

Being Fully Seen Is Scary but Liberating

One of the hardest parts of embracing femininity in a serious career is the fear of judgment. Being fully seen, really seen, means accepting that some people will misunderstand you. They may reduce you to your appearance, question your competence, or assume your personality before you’ve even opened your mouth. In environments where credibility feels hard-won, it can seem safer to blend in: choose the neutral option, quiet your style, dull your voice, keep your softness private. Safety, in this context, often looks like invisibility.

And I understand the instinct. Judgment can be subtle but constant, a look that lingers too long, a comment disguised as “advice,” a joke that tells you exactly what people think you should be. Over time, you start anticipating it. You rehearse how you’ll come across. You calculate what will be “too much.” You learn to edit yourself before anyone else has the chance to. It’s exhausting, not because femininity is exhausting, but because self-monitoring is.

The truth is, hiding who you are comes at a cost. It drains energy that could be spent learning, growing, and showing up fully. It creates a low-grade stress that follows you into rooms you’ve earned the right to be in. It can make you second-guess your instincts, soften your opinions, or delay opportunities because you’re worried about how you’ll be perceived. And perhaps most painfully, it teaches you to associate authenticity with risk, as if being yourself is the problem instead of the prejudice you’re navigating.

I’ve learned that the courage to be authentic leads to a different kind of safety, the safety of self-trust. When you stop editing yourself to be accepted, you reclaim your energy. You stop living in a constant state of performance. You make room for confidence that isn’t dependent on approval, because it’s built on alignment. And once you’re no longer trying to fit into someone else’s definition of “professional,” you start attracting what’s actually meant for you: mentors who value your substance, colleagues who respect your humanity, and opportunities that don’t require you to shrink to succeed.

Authenticity also changes your relationships. When you show up as a curated version of yourself, you may be liked, but it’s a fragile kind of liking, because it’s tied to the mask. When you show up as you are, the connections you build tend to be deeper and steadier. You’re not constantly wondering, "Would they still respect me if they knew the real me?" They already do, because they met you that way.

For women in medicine, this matters beyond individual confidence. It’s cultural. Creating space for diverse expression isn’t a superficial issue; it’s part of building workplaces where women can lead without self-erasure. It looks like challenging the idea that authority has one tone, one wardrobe, one personality type. It means mentoring students and younger colleagues with a message that is both honest and empowering: you can be excellent without becoming unrecognizable to yourself.

Sometimes it’s quiet, everyday resistance. Wearing pink scrubs because they make you feel like you. Choosing the earrings. Keeping the softness in your voice without apologizing for it. Speaking up with kindness and still being taken seriously. Leading with empathy and refusing to let anyone frame it as weakness. It’s setting a standard, not just for how you want to be treated, but for what you’re willing to sacrifice to belong.

Because the goal isn’t to prove femininity can survive in serious spaces. The goal is to stop treating femininity as something that needs permission. And the more women who show up whole: smart, capable, soft, bold, feminine, direct, the less “brave” it will feel for the next person to do the same. That’s how freedom spreads, one unedited woman at a time.

Embracing Femininity Is Who I Am

I am a future forensic pathologist, and I love pink. That sentence isn’t just a fun fact or a color preference. For me, it’s a declaration. I can pursue one of the most serious, demanding paths in medicine without shrinking the parts of myself that feel soft, feminine, or joyful. I can be rigorous and exacting, trusted and capable, and still openly love what I love.

Because pink, in the way people react to it, has never been only a color. It’s a symbol, often loaded with assumptions about intelligence, authority, and strength. Saying I love it anyway is my way of refusing those assumptions. I refuse to edit myself to fit a mold that was never made with women’s full humanity in mind. I refuse to treat femininity like a liability and have to minimize myself in order to be respected. My femininity is not a costume I put on after work; it’s part of my identity, my confidence, and my voice.

Reclaiming femininity isn’t about performing it for anyone else. It’s about ownership. It’s about choosing authenticity over approval, even when it would be easier to blend in. It’s about not letting “professionalism” become a euphemism for erasure. In medicine, where so many women have had to fight to be taken seriously, it can feel tempting to adopt whatever look or persona seems least controversial. But I don’t want success that requires self-abandonment. I want a career that reflects the whole me, not a version of me filtered through other people’s comfort.

For strong women, especially those in medicine, reclaiming femininity can be a quiet kind of revolution. It challenges the outdated idea that authority must look a certain way or sound a certain way. It expands the picture of what a doctor, a leader, or a scientist can be. It creates permission for the next person, especially the student who’s watching, to show up without apologizing for her style, her softness, her warmth, or her brightness. Because the truth is: we don’t have to sacrifice parts of ourselves to succeed. We can be brilliant and feminine. Precise and compassionate. Ambitious and gentle. We can build careers that don’t demand we become harder, duller, or smaller to be considered legitimate.

I’m not here to prove that pink belongs in medicine. I’m here to prove that I belong in medicine, exactly as I am.

Practical Ways to Reclaim Femininity in Serious Careers

• Get dressed like you mean it. Wear the pink, the gloss, the jewelry...whatever makes you feel like yourself. Not for attention. For alignment.

• Stop asking permission. If it’s allowed and it’s practical, you don’t need to justify it. You’re not on trial for being feminine.

• Let your work speak, and let you be seen. Be excellent on purpose, then don’t hide behind excellence like it’s an apology for your style.

• Choose people who don’t require you to shrink. Build friendships and professional circles where you’re celebrated, not corrected.

• Find mentors who look like freedom. The women who lead, publish, teach, and still show personality? Keep them close.

• Be that example for someone else. Compliment the student with the bow, the resident with the bold lip, the colleague with bright scrubs. Normalize it out loud.

• Protect your softness like it’s sacred. Rest, therapy, journaling, gym walks, prayer, whatever keeps you grounded. Don’t let a “serious” career steal your gentleness.

• Set boundaries around appearance policing. If someone’s comment isn’t about safety, policy, or hygiene, it’s just an opinion, and you can decline it.

• Remember the point: You’re building a life, not just a résumé. And you shouldn’t have to become less of a woman to become more of a professional.

Being a woman in medicine means constantly navigating expectations, some spoken but most unspoken, about who we should be and how we should look. Be confident, but not “too much.” Be warm, but never emotional. Be polished, but not feminine enough to be dismissed. It can feel like you’re always translating yourself into a version that feels easier for other people to respect.

But I genuinely believe the future belongs to women who refuse to split themselves in half to succeed. The ones who walk into serious spaces as their full selves: smart, disciplined, soft, bold, feminine, direct, without making any of it a disclaimer.

Competence has no single look. It’s not a shade of scrubs or a hairstyle or the absence of pink. It’s what you know, how you think, how consistently you show up, and how you care for people when it matters most. And softness? Softness is a form of strength. It’s empathy with boundaries. It’s calm under pressure. It’s the ability to be humane without losing your edge. In medicine, that kind of strength doesn’t make you weaker; it makes you safer, better, and more trustworthy.

Authenticity is the key to freedom because it gives you your energy back. When you stop performing to be palatable, you stop shrinking to fit rooms you’ve earned. You build a career that doesn’t just look successful from the outside, but actually feels like yours on the inside.

This week, I hope you stand in your power and take up space, without apologizing, without shrinking, without editing the parts of you that make you you. Walk into every room like you belong there (because you do), let your softness and your strength exist together, and choose yourself on purpose. I’ll see you next week.

Pink scrubs = powerful, professional, and authentic.