Gender Equality Seminar Series, 'Boys in white': The making of a gendered elite in academic medicine Dr Elsa Boulet (Universté de Rouen) and Dr Mathilde Julla-Marcy (Nantes Université)

For the second seminar in the Gender Equality Seminar Series, on the 28th October at 12pm, we welcome Dr Elsa Boulet (Universté de Rouen) and Dr Mathilde Julla-Marcy (Nantes Université):

Despite the removal of legal barriers to women’s entry into higher education, and despite the increasing proportion of women amongst students, women remain under-represented among faculty, in particular in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Drawing on the case of academic medicine in France, we explore the formal and informal processes through which gender inequalities in training and career are reproduced. 

The persistence of the glass ceiling in academic medicine in France is remarkable given the feminization of French medical training over the last 50 years. Women now represent 64% of medical students and 54% of hospital doctors, but only 49% of junior faculty staff (maître de conférences), and 20% of senior faculty staff (professeur). We contend that the higher positions of academic medicine constitute a gendered elite in two senses. 

First, a series of obstacles throughout the training leads to the exclusion of women and therefore to the over-representation of men in these positions. Second, academic medicine constitutes a “gendered organization” (J. Acker) in which both men and women have to behave as a “disembodied worker […] whose life centers on his full-time […] while his wife or another woman takes care of his [or her] personal needs and his [or here] children” (Acker, 1990, p.151).