PlayDoc M.D.: Sexual Harassment and Discrimination in US Medical Schools in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

Summary Since women’s entrance the historically male-dominated medical profession in small numbers in the nineteenth century, they faced numerous exclusions and obstacles. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the number of women attending co-educational medical schools increased significantly, male students and faculty members responded with renewed opposition by deploying hypersexualised innuendo including references to Playboy magazine. This article brings together a range of material, including Playboy, student yearbooks, teaching materials, contemporary studies and oral histories, to document the masculine heterosexual peer culture that pervaded US medical schools, where sexual innuendo and centrefold-style images were commonplace. This learning environment influenced male students, perpetuating harmful views about women and fostering camaraderie at the expense of their female colleagues. These experiences also impacted female students, who confronted and negotiated encounters with sexual harassment, while balancing study, career ambitions and personal wellbeing.