Tackling Gender Segregation in Medical Specialisation Paths: Choices, Careers, and Opportunity Structure

The research intends to deal with a topic of relevant importance: gender inequalities in educational and professional paths. The scientific literature has placed this issue at the centre of the debate on the broader theme of gender inequalities within the “knowledge society”, with a very extensive body of studies and research. The proposal presented here, while drawing on these studies, intends to assume a very specific and, at least for the Italian context, still little explored perspective of the phenomenon. The main objective of this project is, in fact, to investigate gender differences in training and access to the medical profession. More specifically, we aim to identify the psychological, cultural, organisational, and social factors that influence the gender imbalance in medical specialties, a training and professional domain with very interesting characteristics in relation to the issue of gender inequalities. Medical training and activity are characterised, indeed, on the one hand, by a high rate of feminisation, but on the other hand, especially in the area of specialisation, significant gender differences emerge that show a higher presence of men in some branches (urology, orthopaedics, etc.) and women in others (paediatrics, gynaecology, etc.), with a strong gender segregation which is frequently linked to significant inequalities in terms of wages, career expectations and social prestige To be able to analyse which social processes, relational mechanisms, and gender stereotypes operate at the basis of this segregation, the project foresees various actions. These actions will concern both the Italian territory and the in-depth analysis of a case-study, the University of Eastern Piedmont, and a multidisciplinary range of methodological skills (standardised quantitative and flexible qualitative instruments in a mixed-method perspective) will be used, involving researchers from different fields.