La mort aurait-elle mauvais genre?

Abstract

Death, gender and social origins. The structure of medical specialization. The French medical sphere has undergone a profound transformation in the last forty years. The population of doctors shot up from the 1960s on. The proportion of women doctors has continued to grow from the same period. The present article attempts to depict these phenomena, from a sociological standpoint, through an analysis of the structure of the specialization of medicine. First of all the article outlines the structure of the specialization using such indicators as sex-ratio and the social background of post graduated students (doctoral students). This structure is then compared to an indicator that refers to the patients themselves : the death-rate in the specialized hospital departments. For each of the indicators used, a great degree of regularity in the hierarchies appears in the distribution of the statistics, accompanied by limited yet relevant variations for the decade in question. Under the combined influence of the development of the higher-education system and then the creation of a numerus clausus (thus increasing the selectivity of medical studies), of the feminization of the medical profession and the standardization of the doctoral program induced by the reform of the medical curriculum in the 1980s, the social structure of the specialized areas of medicine, which was coherent and shifting was reinforced. Today this structure is characterized by a polarization of the social division of medical labor according specialists gender and social origins. Once this polarization is pointed out, one sees that it crystallizes the collective experience of the interns and particularly the starkest ordeal faced by med students, that of the death of a patient. It is as though, during their years of medical school, specialists collectively learned to distance themselves from the potential and inevitable death of their future patient.