Gender roles, medical practice roles, and ob-gyn career choice: a longitudinal study

This paper discusses follow-up data from physicians who were studied ten years earlier when they were medical students. Seventeen physicians were practicing ob-gyn, and 57 of the physicians studied had been interested in an ob-gyn career when they were medical students. At Time 1, women were more likely than men to be strongly interested in ob-gyn, but they were no more likely than men to be ob-gyn physicians at Time 2. The desire to have a surgical specialty was much more important to men than to women practitioners. Men ob-gyn practitioners were significantly more traditional in their sex-role outlook as medical students than were either women practitioners or women who had been strongly interested in the field but did not enter it. The data suggest that women ob-gyn physicians are more likely than their male peers to be egalitarian in their relationships with female patients.