Over the past 30 years, there have been some great achievements in gender equity. The number of women enrolled in professional degrees, such as law and medicine, rose from less than 25% in the 1970s to more than 50% in 2015. Australia has introduced a number of equal opportunity policies in health care and in 2000 achieved gender parity in medical schools.
Today, women are typically the dominant group within medical schools and yet remain under-represented in formal leadership positions and particular speciality areas. Although today there is greater female participation in medical roles, it still appears that women are hitting the glass ceiling.
Similar sorts of trends in gender participation are found in other countries such as the UK, Canada and the US. Given these broader trends, we could infer that these patterns are the result of “natural” processes related to the relative merits of the sexes.
Yet studies in Sweden show remarkably similar preferences for speciality areas across male and female medical students. Like Australia, these preferences have not typically translated into representation across the health workforce. This suggests there are forces in place that mean women do not go into their preferred roles.
Women in leadership
Despite the significant representation of women within the medical workforce, today fewer than 12.5% of hospitals with more than 1000 employees have a female chief executive. 28% of medical schools have female deans. 33% of state and federal chief medical officers or chief health officers are female.
In 1986, fewer than 16% of specialists were women. This rose to 34% in 2011.
While this is a substantial increase, women are also woefully underrepresented in these figures. There are also distinct gender patterns across specialist roles. Women’s participation is skewed towards pathology (58%), paediatrics (53%), obstetrics and gynaecology (49%) and underrepresented in orthopaedic surgery (6%), vascular surgery (11%) and cardiothoracic surgery (12%).
A popular explanation for these patterns is that there is a lag phenomenon at play. Once current women advance through their career, figures will self-correct and result in more gender balance in the system.
A more pessimistic view (and one we would subscribe to) is that women are being channelled into particular areas of the profession that are lower status and attract lower pay, while more high-profile roles remain in the hands of men.
This is not to say that male doctors are (all) actively working to keep women excluded from these roles. There are a range of reasons for the barriers around perceptions of capability, capacity and credibility.
Capability, capacity, credibility
The evidence suggests that women are as (and possibly more in some cases) intellectuallycapable of the high-profile roles that they are poorly represented in.