Biography Building To Insure The Future: Women's Negotiation Of Gender Relevancy In Medical School*

In this paper I focus on how women in their first year of medical school build biographies of fitness as a means of negotiating the status of peer in a male-dominated group. Their goal is to negotiate a master status and primary identity as medical student. They do this by making gender, a key characteristic, both irrelevant and relevant. I also discuss the technique of using interview data to provide a particular perspective on the medical students' situation and their use of the interview as a vehicle for identity building. I conclude that women's apparent success in maintaining identities as successful people and in negotiating barriers to the collegia! status stem both from their numbers and from using situationally appropriate vocabularies of motives to build past and future biographies of fitness.