Gender and Supportive Co‐Worker Relations in the Medical Profession

Abstract

Women's growing numerical representation in the professions has not necessarily translated into women being truly integrated in these occupations. Questionnaire data are used to examine whether female physicians are socially integrated in the male‐dominated profession of medicine in terms of the support they receive from their medical colleagues compared to male physicians. The literature on tokenism and homophily suggests that women in male‐dominated professions receive less support than their male colleagues, whereas the social support literature predicts that women typically receive more emotional support than men but less informational and instrumental support. The results of this study shed light on the complex and multi‐layered ways in which gender is relevant to our understanding of the extent to which co‐workers provide empathy, information and assistance to one another.

Contradictions concerning care: Female surgeons' accounts of the repression and resurfacing of care in their profession

“…Like other professions, its status was secured through inter-related processes of excluding women from entry while also depending on their support and care work, both inside and outside the paid workforce (see Davies, 1996). While women did eventually secure entry through the institutionalization of 'gender-neutral' criteria of individual merit, and access to education (Witz, 1990), this does not mean they have been fully integrated (Wallace, 2014). In fact, surgery is one area of medicine that has been particularly resistant to change, both in terms of increasing the numbers of women and its persistent 'sex-typing' as masculine.…”

Considering Context in Academic Medicine

“…For example, the experience of being a woman in a department where the majority of faculty are women may be quite different from being a woman in a department where only a quarter of the faculty are women. 32,33 Similar effects may hold for factors such as race, and there are known gender and racial differences in medical school graduates' choice of specialty. 34,35 Faculty who are in departments with a relatively low representation of their own race, gender, age group, or other easily observable characteristic may have different experiences of the organization than those in departments where their group enjoys greater representation.…”

Sick Leave—A Signal of Unequal Work Organizations? Gender perspectives on work environment and work organizations in the health care sector: a knowledge review

“…When it comes to gender structures in the field of medicine, Wallace (2014) shows that women working in female-dominated specialties get more formal and instrumental support than those working in male-dominated specialties (Wallace 2014). This could imply that when the group of women constitutes a critical mass the group is professionally recognized.…”