Women in medicine
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Historically and in many parts of the world, women's participation in the profession of medicine (as physicians, for instance) has been significantly restricted, although women's practice of medicine, informally, in the role of caregivers, or in the allied health professions, has been widespread. Most countries of the world now guarantee equal access by women to medical education, although not all ensure equal employment opportunitiesSee generally, "Women's Human Rights", 1998, Human Rights Watch (available online). and gender parity has yet to be achieved within the medical specialties and around the world.
History of women in medicine
Women's participation in the medical professions was limited by law and practice during the decades while medicine was professionalizing.See generally Ehrenreich & English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. However, women continued to practice medicine in the allied health fields (nursing, midwifery, etc.), and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women made significant gains to access to medical education and medical work through much of the world. These gains were sometimes tempered by setbacks; for instance, Mary Roth Walsh documented a decline in women physicians in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, such that there were fewer women physicians in 1950 than there were in 1900.Walsh, 1977. However, through the latter half of the twentieth century, women had gains generally across the board. In the United States, for instance, women were 9% of total US medical school enrollment in 1969; this had increased to 20% in 1976.Walsh, 1977. By 1985, women comprised 14% of practicing US physicians.Morantz-Sanchez, Preface.At the beginning of the twenty-first century in industrialized nations, women have made significant gains, but have yet to achieve parity throughout the medical profession. For instance, women have achieved near parity in medical school in some industrialized countries, and in the United States, women actually made the majority of the medical student body in 2003."Applicants to U.S. Medical Schools Increase; Women the Majority for the First Time", Association of American Medical Colleges, Nov. 3, 2003, press release ("Women made up the majority of medical school applicants for the first time ever"). However, the practice of medicine remains disproportionately male overall. In industrialized nations, the recent rough parity in gender of medical students has not yet trickled into parity in practice. In many developing nations, neither medical school nor practice approach gender parity. Moreover, there are skews within the medical profession: some medical specialties, such as surgery, are significantly male-dominated,Dixie Mills, "Women in Surgery - Past, Present, and Future" (2003 presentation, Association of Women Surgeons; available at AWS website. while other specialties have achieved gender parity. Biomedical research and academic medical professions -- i.e., faculty at medical schools -- are also disproportionately male. Research on this issue, called the "leaky pipeline" by the National Institutes of Health and other researchers, shows that while women have achieved parity with men in entering graduate school, a variety of discrimination causes them to drop out at each stage in the academic pipeline: graduate school, postdoc, faculty positions, achieving tenure; and, ultimately, in receiving recognition for groundbreaking work.The term was coined by S.E. Berryman in "Who Will Do Science?", 1983; see Louise Luckenbill-Edds, "2000 WICB / Career Strategy Columns (Archive)", Nov. 1, 2000, WICB Newsletter, American Society for Cell Biology.A. N. Pell, "Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Women Scientists in Academia", Journal of Animal Science, v.74, pp. 2843-2848 (1996), available online at Journal of Animal Science, FASS.org.Jackob Clark Blickenstaff, "Women and Science Careers: Leaky Pipeline or Gender Filter?", Gender and Education, v.17, n.4, pp. 369-386 (Oct. 2005).National Academy of Sciences, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. (See women in science for a broader discussion.)
Schools of medicine for women
When women were routinely forbidden from medical school, they sought to form their own medical schools.Hospitals with significant female involvement
Pioneering women in medicine
Women's history and women's health movement
Scholars have been examining the history and sociology of medicine for decades. Biographies of pioneering women physicians were common throughout this time, but the study of women in medicine took particular root with the advent of the women's movement in the 1960s, and in conjunction with the women's health movement. Two publications in 1973 were critical in establishing the women's health movement and scholarship about women in medicine: First, the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1973 by the Boston Women's Health Collective,Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973). and second, "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Female Healers", a short paper by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English also in 1973.Ehrenreich & English, 1973. The Ehrenreich/English paper examined the history of women in medicine as the professionalization of the field excluded women, particularly midwives, from the practice. Ehrenreich and English later expanded the work into a full-length book, For Her Own Good, which connected the exclusion of women from the practice of medicine to sexist medical practices; this text and Our Bodies, Ourselves became key texts in the women's health movement.The English/Ehrenreich text laid out some early insights about the professionalization of medicine and the exclusion of women from the profession, and numerous scholars have greatly built upon and expanded this work. These scholars include:Next Page
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