The Changing Face of Medicine: Women Doctors and the Evolution of Health Care in America (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work)

The number of women entering medical school and residency and practicing medicine in the United States has grown steadily over the past four decades. The Changing Face of Medicine is an exploration of multiple aspects of this change, including societal developments, immigration, economics, and the women's movement. . . . This book will allow educators, administrations, reformers, and representatives of funding sources as well as future physicians to understand how American medicine came to be as it is now. Bonnie J. Dattel, MD, New England Journal of Medicine

In 2009, half of all newly minted physicians will be female; in 1969 that figure was fewer than one in ten. In their detailed, data-driven portrait of the dramatic rise of women in medicine, Ann Boulis and Jerry Jacobs do an excellent job of explaining both the reasons for the trend toward numerical equality among physicians and its key consequences. They argue that women entered medicine primarily because broad barriers were lifted not, as others have suggested, because women were more willing than men to accept (or contributed to) occupational status decline. In addition, as practicing physicians, women differ little from men in their overall patterns of care, and as future leaders of the profession they are unlikely to exhibit much difference in leadership style. Forrest Briscoe, Industrial and Labor Relations Review

In The Changing Face of Medicine, Ann K. Boulis and Jerry A. Jacobs draw on a compelling mix of hard data and personal anecdote to provide a clear and comprehensive analysis of how women as physicians shape the practice of medicine, and in turn, how the practice of medicine shapes these women. Katrina S. Firlik, MD, neurosurgeon and author of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside

This comprehensive and illuminating report on the current status of women physicians and their impact on American medicine will surprise and educate you. Health care teachers, students, and researchers will want to read this book and mine it for important data on gender and medical care in the United States today. Judith Lorber, Professor Emerita, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, CUNY, author of Women Physicians: Careers, Status, and Power and Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change