Over 50% of medical school classes in the US are currently are female. BUT, women are still overwhelmingly clustered in poorly valued medical professions like pediatrics or internal medicine. And, women physicians are paid on average something like only 80% of what a male physician makes, EVEN when you account for women working part-time, etc. It is a little depressing.
In my field of interventional cardiology, only about 10% of such physicians nationally are female.
An NYT op-ed says the productivity of female doctors does not match that of men because the women want more work-life balance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12sibert.htmlDon�t Quit This Day Job
By KAREN S. SIBERT
June 11, 2011
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But the productivity of the doctors currently practicing is also an important factor. About 30 percent of doctors in the United States are female, and women received 48 percent of the medical degrees awarded in 2010. But their productivity doesn�t match that of men. In a 2006 survey by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, even full-time female doctors reported working on average 4.5 fewer hours each week and seeing fewer patients than their male colleagues. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 71 percent of female pediatricians take extended leave at some point � five times higher than the percentage for male pediatricians.
This gap is especially problematic because women are more likely to go into primary care fields � where the doctor shortage is most pronounced � than men are. Today 53 percent of family practice residents, 63 percent of pediatric residents and nearly 80 percent of obstetrics and gynecology residents are female. In the low-income areas that lack primary and prenatal care, there are more emergency room visits, more preventable hospitalizations and more patients who die of treatable conditions. Foreign doctors emigrate to the United States to help fill these positions, but this drains their native countries of desperately needed medical care.
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