Towards gender balance: but will women physicians have an impact on medicine?

The increasing numbers of women in medicine in western societies has raised the issue about their impact on medical practice. As a way of addressing the issue, this paper explores women's position in medicine in the Nordic countries, where the medical profession will soon be gender-balanced. Support for both a ghettoization and a vanguard argument for women physicians can be documented. The final section offers three sociological perspectives--the socialization theory, the neo-Weberian, and the social constructionist--as theoretical explanations for the gender segregation of medicine and as diagnostic paradigms and potential heuristic devices to aid women's empowerment as medical providers.