This critical assessment of the division of labour in medicine sets current practice in its historical context. The book demonstrates the centrality of gender divisions both between and within the individual medical and health professions - doctors, nurses, midwives and others. Drawing on accounts from different countries and a wide range of professional groups, the contributors examine the extent to which the division of labour is changing and the effect of such changes on the status of women within the health professions. While the proportion of female doctors is rising, the continued constraints on women attaining full equality are explored.
Women now represent over half of medical school matriculants, almost half of residents and fellows, and over a third of practicing physicians nationally. Despite considerable representation among the physician workforce, women are paid 75 cents on the dollar compared with their male counterparts after accounting for specialty, geography, time in practice, and average hours per week worked. This pay gap is significantly greater than the one reported for US women workers as a whole and has shown little improvement over time. While much has been written about the problem, a robust discussion about how to rectify the situation has been missing from the conversation. Closing the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine is the first comprehensive assessment of how cultural expectations and compensation methodologies in medicine work together to perpetuate salary disparities between men and women physicians. Since the gender gap reflects a convergence of forces within our healthcare enterprises, achieving pay equity can be an overwhelming undertaking for institutions and their leaders. However, compensation is foremost a business endeavor. Therefore, a roadmap for operationalizing equity within the finance, human resources, and compliance structures of our organizations is critical to eliminating disparities. The roadmap described in this book breaks down the component parts of compensation methodology to reveal their unintentional impact on salary equity and lays out processes and procedures that support new approaches to generate fair and equitable outcomes. Additionally, the roadmap is anchored in change management principles that address institutional culture and provide momentum toward salary equity. The book begins with a review of the evidence on the gender pay gap in medicine. The following chapter discusses how gender-based differences in performance assessments, specialty choice, domestic responsibilities, negotiation, professional resources, sponsorship, and clinical productivity accumulate across women’s careers in medicine and impact evaluation, promotion, and therefore compensation in the healthcare workplace. The next two chapters focus, respectively, on how compensation is determined - highlighting potential pitfalls for pay equity - and regulatory and legal considerations. Chapters 5 and 6 explore organizational infrastructure, salary data collection and analysis, and culture change strategies necessary to rectify compensation inequities. Chapter 7 offers a detailed account of one medical institution’s successful journey to achieve salary equity. The book’s final chapter emphasizes that closing the gender pay gap is at its essence a business endeavor and recommends that organizations assess progress and cost with the same attention, rigor, and regularity as afforded other operating expenses. Closing the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine offers a detailed roadmap for healthcare organizations seeking to close the gender pay gap among their physician workforce. This first-of-its-kind book will assist institutions plan courses of action and identify potential pitfalls so they can be understood and mitigated. It will also prove a valuable resource for transformational leadership and systems-based change critical to attaining compensation equity.
In Gender, Work Stress, and Health, editors Debra L. Nelson and Ronald J. Burke explore how socially defined gender roles affect individuals' experience of stress and health at work. Working with a group of interdisciplinary contributors, they examine the interplay of gender, individual differences, social support, coping skills, family dynamics, and aspects of the work environment and ask how these affect health. This collection draws from the emerging knowledge in the fields of management, psychology, sociology, and epidemiology. Among the questions examined are whether men and women experience different sources of stress at work, whether they experience different symptoms of distress, whether they benefit equally from social support, how they cope, and what organizations are doing to help. Professionals in human resources management, consulting, training and development, and occupational health will be particularly interested in the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts related to corporate culture and flexible workload arrangements and whether family-friendly policies are fulfilling their promise of helping to balance work and family demands. Researchers in management, business, occupational psychology, sociology, and gender studies will find fertile areas for continued exploration within this field.
The presence of women in the practice of medicine extends back to ancient times; however, up until the last few decades, women have comprised only a small percentage of medical students. The gradual acceptance of women in male-dominated specialties has increased, but a commitment to improving gender equity in the medical community within leadership positions and in the academic world is still being discussed. Gender Equity in the Medical Profession delivers essential discourse on strategically handling discrimination within medical school, training programs, and consultancy positions in order to eradicate sexism from the workplace. Featuring research on topics such as gender diversity, leadership roles, and imposter syndrome, this book is ideally designed for health professionals, doctors, nurses, hospital staff, hospital directors, board members, activists, instructors, researchers, academicians, and students seeking coverage on strategies that tackle gender equity in medical education.
Gender and Health is the first book to examine how men's and women's lives and their physiology contribute to differences in their health. In a thoughtful synthesis of diverse literatures, the authors demonstrate that modern societies' health problems ultimately involve a combination of policies, personal behavior, and choice. The book is designed for researchers, policymakers, and others who seek to understand how the choices of individuals, families, communities, and governments contribute to health. It can inform men and women at each of these levels how to better integrate health implications into their everyday decisions and actions.
**Finalist, PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine** A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today. Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers’ lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.
Health status and the experience of working in health care roles are both strongly shaped by gender and, although there have been attempts to incorporate ‘gender awareness’ in both health and employment policies, the significance of gender in these areas continues to be marginalised within public debates and academic discourses. Taking a social constructionist perspective, Watts considers the ways in which gender impacts upon health in all its elements including access, technology, professionalisation, health promotion and health as an important sector of the labour market. She discusses gender as a developing and diversified category, exploring ideas about masculinity and the fluidity of gender boundaries in determining individual identity. Chapters that follow discuss men’s and women’s health; ideology of gender and health, specifically exploring different social norms and ideas about male and female health and the dominant ideological association between femaleness and caring; working for health with particular focus on the gendered interplay of caring and curing roles; technology and changes to gender, health and healthcare; health promotion as a gendered activity and, finally, the importance of introducing an intersectional approach beyond gender to articulate a deeper understanding of health in a postmodern context. The concluding chapter draws together these themes to underscore the importance of placing gender at the centre of health and health care delivery to fully take account of both the different life and health experiences of men and women and the gendered dimensions of working in health care.
The announcement that we had decoded the human genome in 2000 ushered in a new and unique era in biomedical research and clinical medicine. This Third Edition of Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine focuses, as in the past two editions, on the essentials of sexual dimorphism in human physiology and pathophysiology, but emphasizes the latest information about molecular biology and genomic science in a variety of disciplines. Thus, this edition is a departure from the previous two; the editor solicited individual manuscripts from innovative scientists in a variety of fields rather than the traditional arrangement of sections devoted to the various subspecialties of medicine edited by section chiefs. Wherever it was available, these authors incorporated the latest information about the impact of the genome and the elements that modify its expression on human physiology and illness. All chapters progress translationally from basic science to the clinical applications of gender-specific therapy and suggest the most important topics for future investigation. This book is essential reading for all biomedical investigators and medical educators involved in gender-specific medicine. It will also be useful for primary care practitioners who need information about the importance of sex and gender in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness. Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers! - 2018 PROSE Awards - Winner, Award for Clinical Medicine: Association of American Publishers - Outlines sex-specific differences in normal human function and explains the impact of age, hormones, and environment on the incidence and outcome of illness - Reflects the latest information about the molecular basis of the sexual dimorphism in human physiology and the experience of disease - Reviews the implications of our ever-improving ability to describe the genetic basis of vulnerability to disease and our capacity to alter the genome itself - Illustrates the importance of new NIH guidelines that urge the inclusion of sex as a variable in research protocols
The field of gender-specific medicine examines how normal human biology and physiology differ between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. This revealing research covers various conditions that predominantly occur in men as well conditions that predominantly occur in women. Among the areas of greatest difference are cardiovascular disease, mood disorders, the immune system, lung cancer as a consequence of smoking, osteoporosis, diabetes, obesity, and infectious diseases. The Second Edition of Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine focuses on the essentials of gender-specific medicine and the current study of sex and gender differences in human physiology and pathophysiology. New section editors, new chapter authors, and new chapters have been added to reflect the most up-to-date clinical research and practice. - Offers insight into how the gender-specific risks of one organ system's disease affects the health of other organ systems - Outlines the sex-specific differences of normal anatomy and physiology - Illustrates the gender-specific features and quantifies "gender" and "sex" as risk factors across all major diseases - Qualifies and analyzes the results of new drug therapies designed with gender-specific differences in mind: ex, hormone therapy in men and women for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease - All chapters progress translationally from the basic science to the clinical applications of gender-specific therapies, drugs, or treatments - Sections on drug metabolism, aging, and meta-analysis of data incorporated into all disease-specific chapters
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
