Gender, health professions and public health

In this article we review the main results of historical-social research on gender and medical practice, propose a model for applying a gender perspective to the study of healthcare professions, and analyze some current forms of gender bias in Spanish public health societies and publications. The main conclusions indicate: the historic construction of gendered professional identities; the existence of vertical segregation by sex in scientific societies and in journal editorial boards; the existence of androcentric practices in the scientific journals, exemplified by the style of using the initial letter of the authors' first name; the fact that scientific societies do not collect data by sex; the difficulties that all of this implies for quantitative investigations that study the sex variable and adopt a gender perspective; and the need to promote qualitative research on the issue.