ABSTRACT
The healing arts would seem to be especially congenial to persons with the values reported in the research literature as being particularly characteristic of women. Before the Revolution the percentage of Russian physicians who were women was less than 10 per cent; it is between 75 and 80 per cent. The case of women engineers illustrates a different form of sex-typing, one that defines a profession in a restricted male way and thus limits the direction of its development. In terms of sex-typing there is probably no profession more "masculine" than engineering. Women in the past were accustomed to managing great estates when their husbands went to war; the chatelaine of a great manor house in the middle ages was managing a not-insignificant enterprise. The rationale for policies to encourage women to enter the labor force has been that they would supply a wide range of services demanded by the general welfare.
