Physicians, Female

Numbers of Women in the Field and Issues by Subfield

The number of women physicians has been increasing in the United States, especially from 1970 on. Prior to that date, only a small percentage of the entering medical school classes each year were women. In 1970, women were 11 percent of medical students, but by 2005 they were 48.9 percent of medical students, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Because the 1970s were an era of expansion in numbers of medical school seats, the number of new male physicians continued to grow. Beginning in the 1980s, the number of new male physicians began to decline, as the numbers of new physicians produced stabilized, at about 15,000 per year, and women continued to make up increasing proportions of medical school classes. Because many practicing physicians have been practicing since before 1985, there are still many more practicing male physicians (about 650,000) as compared to about 235,000 female physicians.

While in 1970 women were only 7.6 percent of all physicians, by 2004 they were almost 27 percent. Female physicians are more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity than are men, and the representation of women is also increasing among foreign-born physicians now working in the United States.

In contrast, in many European countries, and especially in Nordic countries, by 1998 women physicians were already over one-third of the medical profession, and as high as 50 percent in Finland. Within 20 years, it is expected in those countries that the medical profession will be gender balanced, according to E. Riska. By 1998, for physicians under 30, almost 60 percent or more of the physicians were women in Finland, Norway, and Denmark.

Do women specialize in the same fields within medicine and have similar practices? While women can increasingly be found in all the subfields of medicine and the representation of women increased in all medical specialties between 1975 and 2005, there is [Page 1100]gender stratification within the practice of medicine in terms of specialty, and this is also true in European countries. One specialty (pediatrics) had a majority of female practitioners (53 percent in 2005). Four specialties (neurologic, orthopedic, thoracic, and urological surgery) all had less than 6 percent female representation. Other specialties with more than 35 percent female representation include child psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, dermatology, general preventive medicine and physical medicine.

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