Gender Stereotypes

By Laura Villarreal

In this week’s research, I looked at a very well known bias that men are doctors and women are nurses. As a woman aspiring to be a doctor, I am aware that I will face this stereotype every day. Starting off my freshman year of college, I have already experienced someone with this mindset. My chemistry teaching assistant, who is also my chemistry learning coach for the program I am in, automatically assumed I was a pre-nursing major and started talking about other girls that he helps too. I wasn’t offended but it was weird to me that he just thought that I was pre-nursing.

Even though women make up 50 percent of medical school students, people still make these assumptions. A study by Livescience says that when asked to pair the names Jonathan and Elizabeth with doctor and nurse, the people are more likely to pair Jonathan with doctor and Elizabeth with nurse. I feel like this discourages women to become doctors. Why go through years of medical school to get an M.D. when you won’t even be recognized for it in your workplace? I think nurses are a vital part of any hospital, but doctors go through more training and schooling so they should be recognized for it.

     Subconsciously, I still make the same assumptions between men and women. I think it has to do with the way nurses and doctors are portrayed. In Halloween stores, there is always “sexy nurse” costumes for women and “hot doctor” costumes for men. I have never seen costumes vise versa. I also think about the television show M.A.S.H. from the 70’s I used to watch with my dad when I was younger. It was set in South Korea during the Korean war and it was about a mobile army hospital. Most of the men characters were doctors and the women were nurses. At that time, there were more male doctors and more female nurses. I think that evolved into the gender stereotype we see today, even though it is not true anymore.

Information found on;

http://www.livescience.com/55134-subconscious-stereotypes-hard-to-budge.html

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/assuming-the-doctors-a-he/?_r=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_(TV_series)#Recurring_characters