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The predicted doctors’ shortage in Austria and the increasing feminisation of the medical profession are aspects of a passionate debate on gender inequality in medical careers and particularly on sufficient medical care in Austria. Therefore, this review summarises main findings on gender inequality in medical careers in Austria using an intersectional lens.

The intersections derived from literature elucidate that gender inequality is not predominantly dependent on having a family including children, but that various combinations of these intersections influence women’s careers.

There is a need to further investigate intersections influencing medical careers in women and to relate these to affirmative action measures. Affirmative action measures need quotas and consideration of various areas besides work–family balance. There is a need to evaluate and adapt interventions to promote women in medicine according to the intersections derived from the literature.

In this introductory chapter, I discuss the rationale for this edited collection and the contribution it can make to advancing knowledge of gender inequalities and promoting social justice in the medical profession and medical education. I provide a short overview of and critique of popular debates in the medical community in the United Kingdom and I also discuss briefly research about women’s careers in the United Kingdom and globally. The introductory chapter provides a description of each chapter and its contribution to scholarship about gender, careers and inequalities in Medicine/Medical Education.

The purpose of this study was to explore the cultural and structural conditions that influence male and female physicians’ career choices and career expectations. Although women constitute 59 percent of the physicians and 55 percent of the specialists in Finland in 2014, the rate of women in oto-rhino-laryngology (38 percent) was one of the lowest among the specialties. The data consist of semi-structured interviews with young physicians (N = 19), who have entered a career in oto-rhino-laryngology (ORL) in Finland.

The results point to three features which characterize the career pattern in the specialty. First, the specialty is not one that draws students to medicine per se but rather one that is chosen during medical training. The decision to specialize in ORL was by many respondents framed as a “coincidence,” while others were attracted by the diverse character of the specialty. Second, the skills needed for being a “good” practitioner were defined as handiness, courage, and social skills, but these were not defined in a gendered way. Third, the career prospects for women within the specialty were defined by a neutralizing or a gendering framework. The neutralizing framework was represented by the pipeline argument which suggests that there is a temporary time lag in women’s representation in higher positions and that women are advancing steadily in the academic and administrative pipeline. The gendering framework pointed to the male ethos of the surgical tasks in the specialty as a barrier for women’s advancement in those areas. This chapter concludes that the pipeline view belittles existing gender inequalities in men’s and women’s medical careers and views gender differences as temporary maladjustments rather than inherent features of gendered organizations.

To shed light on how gender norms are reproduced in medical training and practice through an exploration of representations of the problem of “work–life balance.” Women physicians and women physician-researchers (WPs/WPRs) in Canada and in the United States experience social and health inequities when compared to their men colleagues. Despite current medical school acceptance parity, upon entering the medical workforce, women work harder than men to succeed within the historically male-dominated structures and value system of the medical profession.

We performed a critical discourse analysis of articles retrieved from academic databases and leading Anglo-American journals that discussed “work–life balance,” to investigate how the discourse contributed to, or challenged, the reproduction of gender norms in medicine.

While the medical literature acknowledges that the social and health inequities experienced by WP/WPR result from discriminatory norms and practices, it neglects to challenge built-in gendered inequities in benchmarks for success in the profession. Instead, proposed solutions require that WP/WPR themselves learn to cope and make better lifestyle choices, including downloading domestic responsibilities on socially disadvantaged – racialized and poor – women. Authors’ gender appears to make no difference.

Our search was limited to the Anglo-American literature, often retrieved articles inaccessible via our university library, excluded informal venues (e.g., blogs), and did not include cases of same-sex couples or interviews of WP/WPR. All these may have challenged components of our argument by revealing more nuanced debates, occurring under different political, cultural, and economic contexts.

While individual choices of WP/WPR are important to the protagonists, to successfully address the very real problem of work–life balance experienced by WP/WPR, patriarchal norms should be challenged, failure to comply with these norms should be rejected as explanations for work–life balance challenges, and norms themselves should become the focus of analysis and intervention.

The medical language used by physicians of both genders normalizes gendered inequities, favoring the success of medical men over women, and reproducing the professional and personal disadvantages experienced by the latter, further burdening socially disadvantaged women.

Despite the well‐documented resistance to feminism and gender equality within universities, the profound implications for feminist academics have not received sufficient attention. In this paper the author aims to focus on the inauthentication of feminist academic work by powerful actors in higher education and the implications for feminist academic careers. The author illustrates through her professional experience at a UK medical school how the othering and exclusion of feminists, sustained through surveillance and power mechanisms of organisational life, can disrupt and interrupt feminist academic identity.

This is a reflective piece of work that attempts to illustrate the author's experiences of occupational segregation and marginalisation within a patriarchal and an emerging “entrepreneurial” academic department. The author attempts to represent her lived professional experiences as a feminist academic in a medical school, through the use of narrative and metaphors.

Drawing on notions of othering, interrupted and storied subjectivities, the author illustrates how gendered expectations and constructions of academic performance and success within patriarchal organisations can “make up” and “break up” the professional self and affect the nomadic nature of academic careers and identities.

This paper contributes to theory about workplace identities and practice of gender equality in academia.

The author illustrates how the intersections of identities (feminist, social scientist, woman) can shape personal stories, professional experiences and careers within universities. The author demonstrate how personal stories can uncover gender inequalities and challenge dominant paradigms of knowledge and research within a micro‐web of emotionality and power relations.

Women remain under-represented in leadership positions in both clinical medicine and medical education, despite a rapid increase in the proportion of women in the medical profession. This chapter explores potential reasons for this under-representation and how it can be ameliorated, drawing on a range of international literatures, theories and practices. We consider both the ‘demand’ for and ‘supply’ of women as leaders, by examining: how evolving theories of leadership help to explain women’s’ leadership roles and opportunities, how employment patterns theory and gender schemas help to explain women’s career choices, how women aspiring to leadership can be affected by the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘glass cliff’ and the importance of professional development and mentoring initiatives. We conclude that high-level national strategies will need to be reinforced by real shifts in culture and structures before women and men are equally valued for their leadership and followership contributions in medicine and medical education.

This chapter focuses on the orientation towards the medical profession shown by 18-year-old Sardinian students who were asked to write in an essay how they imagined their future. Interest in the medical profession opens up interesting views on what this path may represent for young people given the current general climate of work uncertainty. This chapter focuses on students’ career narratives and, in particular, on their perceived difficulties in accessing medical studies and on the reasons this profession appears so attractive to them. Medicine is, in fact, constructed as a solid, gendered professional path, with a clear vocation career-wise, and it is kept safe from the increasing uncertainty of the labour market. Further, a career in medicine is easy to imagine because there are several medical TV series. Third, the concept of medicine is embedded with positive values and care-centred attitudes, and it therefore ‘sounds good’. The specific ways in which these orientations are gendered are discussed.

Women in medicine face barriers that hinder progress toward top leadership roles, and the industry remains plagued by the grand challenge of gender inequality. The purpose of this study was to explore how subtle and overt gender biases affect women physicians, physician leaders, researchers, and faculty working in academic health sciences environments and to further examine the association of these biases with workplace satisfaction. The study used a convergent mixed methods approach. Sampling from a list of medical schools in the United States, in conjunction with a list of each state's medical society, the authors analyzed the quantitative survey responses of 293 women in medicine. The authors conducted ordinary least squares multiple regression to assess the relationship of gender barriers on workplace satisfaction. Additionally, 132 of the 293 participants provided written open-ended responses that were explored using a qualitative content analysis methodology. The survey results showed that male culture, lack of sponsorship, lack of mentoring, and queen bee syndrome were associated with lower workplace satisfaction. The qualitative results provided illustrations of how participants experienced these biases. These results emphasize the obstacles that women face and highlight the detrimental nature of gender bias in medicine. The authors conclude by presenting concrete recommendations for managers endeavoring to improve the culture of gender equity and inclusivity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether gendered differences in occupational aspirations still appear when considering students with similar abilities who study competitively in the same achievement‐oriented educational setting.

The hypotheses stipulated an interaction between gender and year of study on students' career aspirations and on career‐style preferences. An interactive expression was constructed, multiplying gender by year of study (i.e. a female student in her freshman year, a female student in her senior year, and so on). A sequence of logistic regressions was used to test the hypotheses. The hypotheses were tested by cross‐sectional analysis of the data, using 802 valid questionnaires collected from a sample of 1,000 Israeli accounting students from the accounting programs at three institutions of higher learning.

It was hypothesized that differences between the sexes in occupational aspirations and career style preferences would evolve and increase with years of study and especially as students approached the end of the academic track. In other words, it was expected that an interaction between gender and year of study would affect students' occupational aspirations and career‐style preferences. The findings supported the hypothesis. In their freshmen year, the sexes shared a similar pattern of aspirations and goals. However, during their later academic years, females reduced their occupational aspirations and revealed a stronger preference for a convenient balance between work and other facets of life. Logistic regressions demonstrated the statistically significant effect of the interaction between gender and academic year on student occupational aspirations and career‐style preferences.

The study demonstrates the decrease in female students’ occupational aspirations during the educational period, and that encouraging young women to obtain male‐type professional education might be insufficient in order to eliminate inequality between the sexes.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the different ways in which experiences of marginalisation within organisations are named and acted upon. Of particular interest is examining the ways in which the visibility of gender discrimination and the invisibility of ethnic discrimination indicate what the professionals in the study identify as horizons of possible individual and collective resistance.

The paper takes as its point of departure Cho et al. (2013) notion of “intersectionality as an analytical sensibility” (p. 795). The material consists of qualitative semi-structured interviews with 15 chief medical doctors employed in two Swedish hospitals.

The findings indicate that while there is an organisational visibility of gender inequality, there is an organisational invisibility of ethnic discrimination. These differences influence the ways in which organisational criticism takes place and inequalities are challenged. Female Swedish identified doctors acted collectively to challenge organisations that they considered male-dominated, while doctors with experience of migration (both female and male) placed more responsibility on themselves and established individual strategies such as working more or des-identification. However, they confronted the organisation by naming ethnic discrimination in a context of organisational silence.

The paper does not explore the different forms of racism (islamophobia, racism against blacks, anti-Semitism). In addition, further research is needed to understand how these various forms of racism shape workplaces in Sweden.

The paper offers new insights into the difference/similarities between how processes of ethnic and gender discrimination are experienced among employees within high-status professions. The value of the paper lies in its special focus on how forms of resistance are affected by the frames of the organisation. The findings stress the importance of intersectional analyses to understand the complex patterns of resistance and consent emerging within organisations.