Gender or Generation? Medical Work-Devotion Schema Among Ob-Gyns Across Three Generations

• In Event: 560 - Regular Session. Race and Gender in the Professions

Abstract

A number of studies have examined how cognitive schema of devotion to work or family or norms of intensive mothering have shaped the standards and expectations of professional women, but this work has not examined physicians, who have traditionally had even more explicit work-devotion norms, nor compared the experiences of men and women or cohorts who have entered the workforce after the Baby Boomers. This interview study of Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Millennial obstetrician-gynecologists finds that a gendered response to a schema of medical work-devotion exists only for Baby Boomer physicians. Later cohorts display more individualized responses, and Millennials as a cohort appear to have broadly rejected or profoundly modified their version of the schema of medical work-devotion.

Author

• Claire Barshied, University of Pennsylvania