We Are Devoted: A song about women in medicine, identity, and the cost behind the statistics.

We Are Devoted

About

We Are Devoted is a song about the lived experience behind the statistics of women in medicine.
While data can measure representation, it rarely captures the emotional realities of training, caregiving, identity, and devotion to both medicine and life beyond it.

Through music and storytelling, this project explores how art can translate research and lived experience into something that can be felt.

Lyrics

We are Strong
Lyrics and music by Athena Reich.

I am a daughter, a mother, a sister, a lover
A doctor, an artist, a thinker and a listener
A thousand lives inside this skin
Each one informs the others within

But somewhere in the blueprints drawn
Are rules for who we must become
Endless single-minded hours
As if mastery were a simple power

We filled the lecture halls in tides
Our hope naive, our white coats bright
Fifty-five percent, the numbers say
Women entering medicine today

But numbers don’t display the shades
Of what’s been asked and what we gave
Where ladders narrow as we climb
And some are quietly shoved aside

Every chart looks clean in black and white
But no one graphs the cost of the fight

We are devoted, We are strong
They said that we did not belong
But they were wrong, they were so wrong
To carry a child, a chart, a song
to paint, to love, is that so wrong?
We bring each life we’ve lived into the room
so healing can break through.

They say devotion means you stay
Until your whole world fades away
But somewhere in a quiet room
A child sleeps beneath the moon

A sister calls, a mother wait
A life beyond these sterile gates
Art and love teach us to heal
but somehow treated not as real

Because a heart that's lived beyond these walls
Can hear what silence never calls

We are devoted, We are strong
They said that we did not belong
But they were wrong, they were so wrong
To carry a child, a chart, a song
to paint, to love, is that so wrong?
We bring each life we’ve lived into the room
so healing can break through.

Every number hides a name
Every dataset a flame
Every woman who stayed and tried
Even when the ladder moved aside

You call it pipeline when we go
As if we simply failed to grow
But pipelines leak where pressure builds
And pressure breaks the strongest will

We are devoted, We are strong
They said that we did not belong
But they were wrong, they were so wrong
To carry a child, a chart, a song
to paint, to love, is that so wrong?
We bring each life we’ve lived into the room
so healing can break through.

They say love is a distraction
But what if love
is medicine
in action?

This song was made possible by generous support from the Ko Iki Alpha Centauri Prize and StudioAMWA.