‘They're not the same as us’: midwives' stereotypes of South Asian descent maternity patients

Abstract The paper examines the stereotypes of South Asian descent women held by midwives in a British hospital. The data are drawn from a small‐scale ethnographic study which investigated the women's maternity experiences. The midwives’ stereotype contained four main themes: the difficulty of communicating with the women; the women's lack of compliance with care and abuse of the service; their tendency to ‘make a fuss about nothing’; and their lack of ‘normal maternal instinct’. The creation, perpetuation and effects of this negative stereotyping are examined in the light of the wider sociological research on patient typification. Black and minority ethnic patients are particularly vulnerable to negative typification because of their visibility combined with the fact that crude racial stereotypes are common in wider society. Stereotyping reflected and reinforced the view that Asian women are ‘all the same’ but ‘not like us’. Midwives used stereotypes to help them to make judgements about the kind of care different women want, need and deserve. It is therefore argued that stereotyping is a factor in the creation of the inequality in health experiences of black and minority ethnic patients.