[Ethics of care and new profiles of the woman].

INTRODUCTION: In health professions listening represents an essential condition for any cure relation. Learning to listen is thus neither easy nor granted. It requires the ability to put oneself in somebody else's place, maintaining self-possession of judgement and the ability of evaluating events.

PROBLEM ANALYSIS: In health professions women have always occupied a privileged position for their sensitiveness and their ability of giving meaning even to everyday life. Empathy is the privileged way women have of getting to know, understand and take care of people. They follow a feminine style which accepts and welcomes other people even if they are not able to explain their intimate contradictions, their anxieties, their difficulties, their pain and weakness. Women know how to be near people, even if they understand they are not up to the situation, not expecting to solve pain: neither personal nor other people's. They act in a different way from men who instead are attached to a reductionism that assumes a theoretical scheme to understand the issue. Man's need to dominate the problem with knowledge makes him sacrifice the complexity of reality in which he lives. Men's simplicity, their tendency to generalize processes and easily find guidelines to proceed with no useless wastes, often sacrifices elements which find no place into the chosen standards. For women this way of behaving, apparently reassuring, is not possible because they are aware that such aspects while escaping their understanding express the personality of the people involved in this process, their uniqueness which does not accept generalisations. Behind interpretative schemes, behind apparently definitive diagnosis, women perceive vagueness and interpretative inadequacy.

CONCLUSIONS: Female rationality is inclined to live with one's own and other's contradictions just because it is strongly attached to a reality which avoids simplification of understanding. It refuses interpretative schemes, theories which try to offer themselves as exhaustive models which can explain all events, lessening the value or even denying elements which do not fall within the interpretation model assumed. Women appear contradictory because they do not refuse confrontation with life contradictions and its perennial changes.