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Over the past twenty-five years, steadily increasing numbers of women have graduated as physicians, in sufficient numbers to be well represented in senior and leadership positions in the nation's academic medical centers. Yet women's expected advancement has stalled. Women rarely hold decision-making positions, and female department chairs or deans continue to be exceedingly rare. Why is this the case? Pololi's study, based on extensive interviews, illuminates medical school culture and shows a sharp disconnect between the values of individual faculty members and the values of academic institutions of medicine. Pololi looks closely at women medical faculty's experiences as outsiders in medicine, opening a window into medical culture. She argues that placing more women and people of color in leadership positions would provide transformative and more effective leadership to improve health care and would help address current inequities in the health care provided to different racial and cultural groups.

In 2006 over 60% of medical graduates in the UK were female, and the number of women going to medical school as'mature students'is steadily increasing. Some of these women will, at some point, choose to have a baby, but the question always asked is how to fit it in with a medical career? Along with the problem of finding time to actually have a baby, and coping as a pregnant doctor, there is the problem of finding information when it is most needed. This book addresses this problem, bringing a wealth of information together in one easy-to-use resource. Written by a mother, who has faced the joys and frustrations of combining medicine and being a mother, this book is a'one-stop-shop'for all mothers and mums-to-be.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.

The increasing proportion of women in the medical profession has been followed keenly both by conservative and feminist observers during the past three decades. Statistics both in Europe and in the United States tend to confirm that women work mainly in niches of the health care system or medical specialties characterized by relatively low earnings or prestige. The segregation of medical work has become increasingly recognized as a sign of inequality between female and male members of the medical profession.Medicine as a social organization is not a universal structure: Health care systems vary in the extent to which physicians work in the private or public sector and in the extent to which they have as a corporate body been able to influence their numbers and the character of their work. The aim of this book is not only to review and to provide an account of women's position in medicine but also to provide an analytical framework. The text revolves around three key issues that illuminate this argument: numbers, medical practice, and feminist agendas of women physicians. The issues are addressed in all the chapters but highlighted as central analytical themes in a cross-cultural context.Challenging previous studies of the medical profession, which have assumed for the most part a gender-neutral stance, Riska's text provides a unique focus. Medical Careers and Feminist Agendas presents a comprehensive, cross-national analysis of the current status of women in three societies where the economics of medical practice vary considerably: a market society, a welfare state, and a formerly communist society in transition. Aimed at a wide audience, this book will be useful for years to come in medical sociology, the sociology of professions, and women's studies. Its historical breadth, current data, and trenchant probing will furnish practitioners and policy-makers alike with a needed analytical tool.