Towards gender balance: but will women physicians have an impact on medicine?

The increasing numbers of women in medicine in western societies has raised the issue about their impact on medical practice. As a way of addressing t he issue, this paper explores women's position in medicine in the Nordic co untries, where the medical profession will soon be gender-balanced. Support for both a ghettoization and a vanguard argument for women physicians can be documented. The final section offers three sociological perspectives - t he socialization theory, the neo-Weberian, and the social constructionist - as theoretical explanations for the gender segregation of medicine and as diagnostic paradigms and potential heuristic devices to aid women's empower ment as medical providers. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserv ed.