WOMEN DOCTORS

I would like to start by looking at some of the background to the PSI study. Some of you may know that Pat Walters and I have been in the field for twenty years. In 1968, in our first Women in Top Jobs study, we looked at women’s careers and their prospects in industry (Fogarty et al, 1971). We went back again in 1979 (Fogarty et al, 1981) to see what had been happening in the eleven years since our research. Since then Pat has been doing other things, I’ve been doing other things, but I returned to look at the careers of women doctors related to the careers of men doctors. This paper is about the research I carried out for the Department of Health on doctors’ careers (Allen 1988a; 1988b). I would like to look at four main areas: first, careers advice and counselling at school and at medical school during post-graduate training and beyond; secondly, medical career structures and the constraints and difficulties which doctors experience in pursuing a career in medicine; thirdly issues surrounding appointments, promotion, patronage and equal opportunities; and fourthly, the question of part-time training, part-time career posts and job-sharing. The full report covers many more aspects of doctors’ careers but these are the four areas that I will concentrate on in this paper. The point of departure for the study was the fact that women will soon, very soon, account for 50 per cent of those entering medical school. The proportion has been rising steadily from around 25 per cent through the 1960s, to 35 per cent in 1975, 46 per cent in 1985 and it really looks as though that 50 per cent figure is about to be cracked,