Gender and the Medical Profession: An Intersectional Approach to Inequality

Dear Colleagues,

Despite popular discourses of feminization in the medical profession across the world (Tsouroufli, 2012; Tsouroufli, Rees, Monrouxe, & Sundaram, 2011) and most recently an increased research interest and publication activity in gender equality in medicine, science, and health (Shannon et al., 2019), gender inequalities persist in the medical profession and continue to influence the lives and careers of medical professionals (Siller, Beck, Hochleitner, & Exenberger, 2020), as well as patient outcomes and quality of clinical care. Research approaches to the study of gender, power, and inequality in the medical profession have been informed by sociological, psychological, critical, and other perspectives from the social sciences. However, the interconnected nature of gender identities and patriarchal systems of oppression with other strands of diversity and axes of inequality (e.g., racism) in the medical profession, have not yet received sufficient attention in the medical and medical education literature, and even the social sciences (Tsouroufli, Özbilgin, & Smith, 2011) and conceptualizations of women and gender continue to suffer from universalism. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), an increasingly popular theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework in health and social sciences (Wilson, White, Jefferson, & Danis, 2019), is useful in identifying and understanding disadvantage and privilege resulting from the interplay and intersections of inequalities of gender, class, ethnicity/race/migration, age, material status, motherhood and caring responsibilities, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion/belief and disability. This relates to questions such as: How are female and male doctors simultaneously positioned as women/men and for example, white, black, migrant, and/or colonial subjects within specific historical situations and organizational medical/health settings and what might be the implications of such positioning for medical careers? What social divisions and differences might be more relevant in specific locations and time for medical professionals, and how might these interact to sustain or challenge power dynamics and medical hierarchies? For example, religion might be a more prevalent identity or signifier of difference and discrimination to a female migrant Muslim doctor in Sweden or the UK, than one who immigrated to an Arab country.

We acknowledge the complexity of intersectionality and the impossibility of addressing all significant differences in one project. However, in this Special Issue we are interested in intersectional approaches to gender inequalities in the medical profession, informed by analysis that addresses privilege, exclusion, and otherness as contingent on the interplay of unstable, fluid social categorizations and multiple structural differences. The aforementioned questions are only illustrative of our interest and commitment to intersectionality for policy and political action and we welcome a polyphony of intersectionality voices aiming to raise awareness about the complexity of gender and stimulate further discussion on gender and intersectionality.

We invite theoretically informed research papers and reflexive pieces of work from all social sciences and methodological approaches including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches. We welcome contributions from any parts of the world and from a plethora of intersectionalities.

References:

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum(1), 139–167.

Shannon, G., Jansen, M., Williams, K., Cáceres, C., Motta, A., Odhiambo, A., Mannell, J. (2019). Gender equality in science, medicine, and global health: where are we at and why does it matter? The Lancet, 393(10171), 560–569. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)33135-0

Siller, H., Beck, C., Hochleitner, M., & Exenberger, S. (2020). "Not a woman-question, but a power-question" - A qualitative study of third parties on psychological violence in academic medicine. . Workplace Health & Safety.

Tsouroufli, M. (2012). Breaking in and breaking out a medical school: feminist academic interrupted? Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 31(5/6), 467–483. doi:10.1108/02610151211235479

Tsouroufli, M., Özbilgin, M., & Smith, M. (2011). Gendered forms of othering in UK hospital medicine: Nostalgia as resistance against the modern doctor. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 30(6), 498–509. doi:10.1108/02610151111157710

Tsouroufli, M., Rees, C. E., Monrouxe, L. V., & Sundaram, V. (2011). Gender, identities and intersectionality in medical education research. Medical education, 45(3), 213–216.

Wilson, Y., White, A., Jefferson, A., & Danis, M. (2019). Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine: The Need for a Conceptual Framework. Am J Bioeth, 19(2), 8–19. doi:10.1080/15265161.2018.1557275

Please submit the draft paper and any questions to special issue guest editors, Professor Maria Tsouroufli (maria.tsouroufli@brunel.ac.uk) and Dr. Heidi Siller (Heidi.Siller@i-med.ac.at) by 1 January 2021.

For those accepted for consideration, paper submissions will be due 31 May 2021, following the manuscript submission instructions below.

Prof. Dr. Maria Tsouroufli
Dr. Heidi Siller
Guest Editors

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• gender inequalities
• intersectionality
• medical profession