Gender and Medical Education

Ann Boulis

Over the past thirty years, the academic status of women has improved dramatically. In fact, college education has become more common for women than men within the last generation. Ins spite of such changes, women remain disadvantaged in the US labor market. The simultaneous progress and disadvantage of women is exemplified in medicine. Over the past thirty years, the proportion of the active physician workforce made up by women tripled, climbing from 6.8 percent in 1970 to 23.0 percent in 1997. Since women currently make up more than 40% of all medical students, their representation in medicine will continue to grow. Nevertheless, research to date suggests that there are substantial gender based differences in medicine. Women physicians are concentrated in relatively few medically specialties and are less likely to hold tenured faculty positions or positions of authority in hospitals. Further, data from the AAMC suggest that women and men experience medical training differently. Relative t their male colleagues, women medical students more frequently report mistreatment during medical school, and are also more likely than their male classmates t pursue graduate medical education in primary care. Women medical students are also more likely to take optional ambulatory clinical training and to work in voluntary health care clinics. Although multiple explanations for gender differences in the status and behavior of physicians have not been identified, the effect of academic experience on sex segregation in medicine is not fully understood. Further, little effort has been made to determine how the relationship between academic experience and gender differences has changed over time. As a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, I will begin to address this gap in the literature. The central goals of my study are: (1) to document trends in the gender gap in medicine and in the experience of medical education and (2) to consider how the relationship between gender differences in medicine and gender differences in the experience of medical education has changed over time. I propose to utilize data from five time-series to assess how differences between male and female physicians have evolved: 1) a survey administered to all students who take the Medical College Admissions Test; 2) a survey of all first year medical students; 3) a survey of all fourth-year medical students; 4) a detailed panel of students enrolled in Jefferson Medical School; and 5) panel data on students enrolled in medical schools in Pennsylvania. For each source, I will examine the longest time-series available, spanning at least the 1990s, and in one case from 1964-2000.

About Ann Boulis

Ann Boulis has a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She is currently completing a one-year postdoctoral fellowship where she is studying how women physicians are reacting to recent changes in the organization and financing of health care. Her fellowship is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ann’s current research interests include: characteristics of the health care workforce, the relationship between academic experiences and careers, health compliance behaviors and the measurement of health status.