a sociological study on women's status in iran's medical education system

sociology of medical education is an area of sociology that could well link the two fields of medical sciences and social sciences together. sociologists believe that the scope of medical science deals with problems and realities much graeter than medical techniques and practices, of which sociology of medical education, described as one of the effective institutions of society as well as medicine, is the most important one. thus, this institution has its own features that can function properly or improperly depending on social realities within the medical sphere. in the light of this, the present study aims to probe into some aspects of iran's medical education system. the review of literature and statistics reveals that women do not enjoy an equal status in the medical system as men naturally do. the available data consists of two sets of trends. the first one shows that females score a higher rate in university enrolment of medical sciences, however, another quite contradictory trend shows a declining trend where females have a lower rate in obtaining high ranking positions within the system. in other words, more girls enter the universities but less continue their studies and attain high ranking scientific and managerial positions in medical universities and higher education centers. this issue gains significance from the perspective of comprehensive development which tends to eliminate all kinds of discrimination and decrease inequalities in all spheres within the society. in this view, the main goal of development is to promote human development opportunities, and therefore the equality between men and women is one of its principles. the theoretical framework within which this study explains women's status in medical education system includes a combination of gender socialization and gender stereotype theories, such as sandra bem’s gender schema theory, and janet saltzman chafetz's gender equity theory. two main methods are available to study the inconsistency in the behavior of iranian female students, one is either to study the concentration factor, and the other one is to study the voluntary factor. however, the latter is selected for the purpose of this study. the research has taken advantage of quantitative method. the statistical population of this research consists of 6146 female students, out of which 301, from the medical universities of iran, shahid beheshti and tehran, are selected as the population by multiple step cluster sampling. moreover, some 107 male medical students are also selected to be used as the control group, making the total size of the population 408. data collection makes use of survey technique and questionnaire. the findings show that gender stereotypes has a negative effect on girls tendency to continue their study, achieve managerial position, and finally obtain high ranking positions in medical education system. the findings of this research related to gender stereotypes in the society, higher education, senior managerial posts and also high ranking positions in the medical education system, support all the related studies conducted previously in this field.