ABSTRACT
Despite women’s movement into the Canadian medical profession in significant numbers in recent decades, they are not evenly spread across all medical specialties. For example, women are well-represented in family medicine, but under-represented in surgery. A variety of factors from concern over work–family conflict, to structural constraints and discrimination, have been proposed to explain this internal sex segregation. Research has only rarely adopted a life course perspective, and considered racial/ethnic differences among women in medicine, to understand specialty decision-making. Drawing on interviews with 15 women medical students in Ontario Canada around their specialty choices, this chapter argues that combining the life course perspective with an intersectional approach sheds new light on the processes contributing to occupational segregation within the medical profession.
