[Intruders or innovators. More women physicians?]

The article discusses the impact of an increasing proportion of women medical doctors in Norway. Will a changing gender composition affect the medical culture as such and, in the event, how? The theoretical point of departure is the social construction of gender. One argument is that gender relations tend to be reconstructed through gendered processes, many of them leading to new forms of gendered divisions of labour among doctors. Women doctors may be considered as the same as, or as different from their male colleagues. Such a distinction is often blurred, but is nevertheless operative. Medicine as a system of production of scientific knowledge is itself assumed to be primarily a product of male thoughts and ideas. Conventional forms and procedures may be challenged by its new members. Medical work as such runs the risk of being trivialized. To both understand and explain current developmental tendencies and contradictions, we need to identify gendered dynamics. There are no easy political solutions, however, to the "gender question" in medicine.