Shouldn't Competence and Compassion Coexist in Medical Professionals? A Study of Psychological Androgyny in Doctors

Medical care is based on doctor-patient relationship. Paradoxically, in medical practice, detachment is perceived as prerequisite virtue necessary for retaining objectivity for acting act competently. However, are competence and compassion essentially mutually exclusive? Socially prescribed gender behaviors, expected of men and women consider some behaviors as masculine (for e.g. competitiveness) and some as feminine (for e.g. gentleness). On the contrary, psychological androgyny suggests that both masculine and feminine behaviors reside in varying degrees in every human being to be expressed in a manner responsive to situational demands irrespective of the biological gender. This therefore can lead to blend of competence with a compassionate approach. The current study was focused on exploration of psychological androgyny in Indian doctors. Although Jung (1958), suggested that androgyny develops only in the latter half of life, the current study did not find any significant difference in psychological androgyny in scores on Bem sex-role inventory either due to age or experience when 30 young postgraduate resident doctors were compared to 30 older experienced consultants. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for training doctors for better doctor-patient interaction to help blend competence with compassion.