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Soc Sci Med. 2001 Jan;52(2):179-87.

Towards gender balance: but will women physicians have an impact on medicine?

Riska E.

Department of Sociology, Abo Akademi University, Finland. eriska@abo.fi

The increasing numbers of women in medicine in western societies has raised the issue about their impact on medical practice. As a way of addressing the issue, this paper explores women's position in medicine in the Nordic countries, where the medical profession will soon be gender-balanced. Support for both a ghettoization and a vanguard argument for women physicians can be documented. The final section offers three sociological perspectives--the socialization theory, the neo-Weberian, and the social constructionist--as theoretical explanations for the gender segregation of medicine and as diagnostic paradigms and potential heuristic devices to aid women's empowerment as medical providers.

PMID: 11144774 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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