Women and careers

October 2005

More women than ever are achieving good career posts. Why are so many abandoning their careers in their prime, ask Dr Maryanne Dever and Dr Jeannie Marie Paterson.

Photography: Greg Ford

In 1873, when women were first gaining entry to universities, a former member of the Harvard Medical School, Dr Edward Clarke, published an influential book, Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls. In it he argued that women should be excluded from higher education for their own good, because the mental stimulation would cause their reproductive organs to atrophy.

While support for such ideas has long since disappeared, the relationship between women, higher education and reproduction still causes debate.

Women now outnumber men in professional courses such as law and medicine. At Monash University in 2004, women accounted for just below 60 per cent of law students and more than 70 per cent of medical students. The quiet feminisation of these student cohorts is surely one of the great success stories of affirmative action in Australian universities. But women's success in gaining entry to these prestigious degree programs has not necessarily translated into professional satisfaction after graduation.

Both the legal and medical professions record worryingly high rates of early and mid-career attrition among women. Although women make up half the articled clerks or first-year solicitors, a 1993/4 Law Institute of Victoria study found they accounted for only 23 per cent of lawyers and 12 per cent of partners in private firms.

Medicine shows a similar pattern. A Royal Australasian College of Surgeons report found that in 1998, women doctors made up 16 per cent of basic surgical trainees, 13 per cent of advanced surgical trainees, and just under 4 per cent of fellows.

Public comment on this trend often takes the form of questioning women's seriousness and ability, or by pointing to the radical incompatibility of childbearing and true professionalism. This leads in turn to women being blamed for crises in the professions.

Last year, Professor Carol Black, president of Britain's Royal College of Physicians, controversially asserted that the growing numbers of women in medicine were threatening the status and power of the profession in the UK and argued that its very survival depended on attracting men back to its ranks. "It has been a profession dominated by white males. What are we going to have to do to ensure it retains its influence?" she asked.

We would suggest that the spotlight needs to be placed not upon the women but upon the entrenched and unexamined understandings of work and professionalism that make careers in these fields difficult for women to sustain.

Look at the way the high levels of commitment expected of lawyers and doctors assume an ideal worker who is a 'functional bachelor'. It is hardly surprising that studies have found work-life balance becomes increasingly difficult for women solicitors if they become mothers, and the arrival of children forms a significant reason for women leaving private practice.

More women GPs in Australia are seeking to work part-time -- currently nearly 47 per cent compared to just over 15 per cent of men -- with research showing that women rate flexibility, stress avoidance, quality relationships and job satisfaction above pay and status.

Something clearly needs to change if the next generation of women lawyers and doctors are to enter professions that can offer them genuine career paths and foster their expertise over the long term.

Dr Maryanne Dever is the director of the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, and Dr Jeannie Marie Paterson is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law.