Early-Career Doctors and In/Justice in Work : The Invisibility of Gender in a ‘Male’ Profession

Abstract

This chapter examines medical doctors’ ways of constructing and mitigating gendered and age-related injustice in their work and careers. Interviews with doctors at different career stages and in different professional settings in Finland are analysed. The analysis demonstrates that the interviewed doctors were not eager to construct the gendered and age-related constraints they or their colleagues face at work as markers of illegitimate inequality. The doctors were more eager to view work-related constraints as the result of personal choices and emphasise doctors’ private responsibility to manage their work and careers. In this chapter, we contextualise these observations as features of the ‘male’ profession of medicine and the profession’s emphasis on middle-class masculinity, which, despite the growing proportion of female physicians in younger cohorts, dominates over other career and work orientations in the culture of the Finnish medical field. The culture of male professions values individual endurance and freedom from family responsibilities, which may have problematic consequences for young doctors, particularly young mothers, whose childcare responsibilities can disproportionately limit their opportunities to perform the expected, normative, middle-class and masculine impressions of themselves as completely devoted to their work.