The session was called “Defeating Impostor Syndrome.” Dr. Marianna Papageorge, a 35-year-old fellow in thoracic surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, had a question.

“Impostor syndrome can often be tied to confidence,” she said when she came up to the microphone. “So as an early career surgeon, especially as you’re doing higher-risk cases, if you have complications, how do you sort of parse those apart and move forward?”

The speaker, Dr. Alexandra Kharazi, a San Diego cardiothoracic surgeon, had a swift answer. “The only surgeons that don’t have complications or mortalities are ones that are not operating very much,” she said, or are “cherry-picking their cases.” Focus instead on all your good outcomes, she advised.

Dr. Kharazi recalled how she once told a male surgeon that she planned to ask for operating privileges at his hospital in order to expand her practice. “And he told me, ‘Well, it’s generally not a good idea to go where you’re not invited.’”

The lesson here: “My entire life has essentially consisted of going where I wasn’t invited,” Dr. Kharazi said. If she hadn’t, she said, “I would be nowhere now.”

So went the second annual meeting of Women in Thoracic Surgery, a group for the less than 10 percent of heart and lung surgeons in the United States who are women, one of the smallest percentages of any surgical specialty. Women make up about 30 percent of surgeons in the United States overall, and a little less than 40 percent of all physicians.

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