‘Beautiful’ Medicine: Gender Segregation by Medical Specialty in Ukraine

Abstract

In Ukraine and in other former Soviet socialist republics, women make up a sizeable majority of those practicing medicine—a proportion estimated at around 70% over the course of the 20th century. Women predominate in most specialties, including prestigious disciplines such as cardiology or oncology, with the stark exception of surgical fields. While gender segregation by medical specialty has often been explained as women having been channelled out from more lucrative fields and into less prestigious medical specialties such as primary care, I suggest that broader sociopolitical and cultural forces are primarily responsible for this horizontal segregation. The central pillars of Ukraine’s dominant version of femininity—motherhood and beauty—gain special place in the nation’s decolonisation process and position women to take up medicine as a profession, while simultaneously preventing them from specialising in surgery in the same high numbers. In medical school and at work, gendered bodies are read to be in the right or wrong place as communities of practice informally instruct students and young practitioners about how easy or difficult it will be for them to belong to certain subfields. ‘Beautiful’ (non-surgical) specialties enhance women’s cultural authority even if they are not always as well-remunerated as the surgical ones. They permit flexible schedules and career paths, connote social grace, and solidify women’s central role in families, and ultimately in national reproduction.