The Right Prescription?
2:19pm
Monday, 2nd August 2004
The occupational segregation debate familiar to gender equality campaigners and experts everywhere took a new twist this morning with a front page story in the Independent about the 'medical timebomb' about to drop as a result of the feminisation of medicine. President of the Royal College of Physicians Carole Black gave an interview in which she warned that the profession risks losing its influence into the future as women continue to out-number their male counter-parts (60% of current medical students are female).
What sounds like an unexpectedly anti-feminist comment from the first woman to hold the RCP top job is in fact testimony to the failure of medicine as a profession to respond to the realities of an increasingly feminised workforce. Women may be rising up the ranks, but the crieria for 'success' (playing politics, sitting on committees, writing papers, knowing the right people) still conforms to the model created by men over a century ago.
But rather than lamenting the fact that women medics apparently don't want to play the men's game, shouldn't we be looking forward to the time when, with critical mass on their side, they'll be able to re-write the rules completely in a more inclusive vein?
The occupational segregation debate familiar to gender equality campaigners and experts everywhere took a new twist this morning with a front page story in the Independent about the 'medical timebomb' about to drop as a result of the feminisation of medicine. President of the Royal College of Physicians Carole Black gave an interview in which she warned that the profession risks losing its influence into the future as women continue to out-number their male counter-parts (60% of current medical students are female).
What sounds like an unexpectedly anti-feminist comment from the first woman to hold the RCP top job is in fact testimony to the failure of medicine as a profession to respond to the realities of an increasingly feminised workforce. Women may be rising up the ranks, but the crieria for 'success' (playing politics, sitting on committees, writing papers, knowing the right people) still conforms to the model created by men over a century ago.
But rather than lamenting the fact that women medics apparently don't want to play the men's game, shouldn't we be looking forward to the time when, with critical mass on their side, they'll be able to re-write the rules completely in a more inclusive vein?
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