The future impact of women physicians on American medicine

Abstract

The author presents a commentary on the effect of the growing number of women physicians in the United States and the influence they may have on the quality of medical care. Consumer interests, as well as 'developing health professional' concerns, have successfully challenged the male-dominated medical profession, and forced it to begin to confront its many weaknesses and inconsistencies. One major phenomenon which clearly has the potential for effecting change in health care is the overwhelming increase in the number of women entering the nation's medical schools; their very numbers may open the door to change. The new women entering medicine are being studied by fellow physicians and social scientists, and they are rapidly overturning everything we thought we knew about women physicians. There was little doubt that women physicians, clustered as they were in less prestigious specialities, and with lower incomes than men, bore close resemblance to women with doctorates in other fields, who also had lower salaries, lower employment status, fewer supervisory responsibilities, and who received less recognition. The new women coming into medicine are choosing more and more to go into private practice, are working longer hours, are more insistent upon recompense, and are moving into more varied disciplines. As recruits from the health movement, often with previous training in another health discipline, they are dedicated to advancing the interests of women as patients. In making more demands of the sytem to bend to what they perceive to be their legitimate needs, they have caused male colleagues to question their own attitudes, life-styles, and career models, with the result that greater flexibility is now being sought for men as well as women. Women do bring to medicine a distinctly feminine world view which makes them more sensitive, more emphatic, and more intuitive. The women physician's influence will be determined by the extent of the backlash by male physicians, their response to the temptation of cooptation, and their adaptive reaction to the above variables. Physicians, despite their power role, provide end-stage treatment rather than the broad-based preventive services which determine the ultimate health of the population. Paradoxically, women physicians are moving away from public health, and will exert their influence primarily as clinicians. Nevertheless, their femine vision will enable them to effect meaningful change, even to restore some measure of common sense to medicine's various excesses.