More women than ever are becoming doctors. Here’s why there are still so few.

Story at a glance

• While women make up the bulk of healthcare workers, female doctors only account for about a third of the U.S.’s physician workforce.

• About 37 percent of doctors in the U.S. were women as of 2021, according to the American Medical Association.

• This is a result of the field historically being male-dominated and attrition rates being higher among female doctors.

More women than ever are studying and practicing medicine across the United States — but a considerable majority of the country’s working doctors are still men.

In recent years, female medical students have begun outnumbering their male peers. As of the 2023-2024 school year, they make up more than 55 percent of students in the country’s M.D.-granting programs, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The ranks of female doctors have also been steadily increasing. In 2007, just over 28 percent of practicing physicians in the country were women. By 2021, the most recent year for which the American Medical Association (AMA) has data, more than 37 percent were.

That figure remains far short of gender parity, however.

Medical experts point to two main reasons why female doctors are still a minority: The physician workforce has not caught up with the shifting makeup of medical school student bodies, and female physicians have higher attrition rates than male ones.

Roberta Gebhard, former president of the American Medical Woman’s Association, noted that medicine has been a predominantly male field for much of the country’s history.

In the past, most medical students were male, so the bulk of older physicians are still men, Gebhard told The Hill.

Women didn’t start accounting for nearly half of matriculated medical school students until recently. And it wasn’t until 2017 that they made up a larger share of first-year medical students than men, and 2019 that they became the majority of all medical students.

And while a growing number of women are entering medicine, they are also leaving the profession at alarmingly higher rates than men.

One 2023 study of close to 300,000 physicians found that attrition rates were significantly higher among female doctors than male ones at every stage of their careers.

The study found that over a five-year period, 38.3 percent of women doctors left their jobs at academic medical institutions compared to 32.4 percent of men. 

Physician burnout, which women experience at a much higher rate than men, plays a major role in this. According to 2022 AMA data, 57 percent of female physicians reported suffering from at least one symptom of burnout, like feeling sad, irritable or fatigued, compared to 47 percent of male doctors.

Work overload appears to be the biggest driver of burnout, according to Gebhard. She noted that like other working women, female doctors tend to do more household work and shoulder caregiving responsibilities for children or parents.

Rachael Clark, a Philadelphia-based family medicine physician, told The Hill that she began to feel burned out after having her first child six years ago.

“I barely made it through the first year of her life still working five days a week,” she said. Clark then had a second baby during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Years of balancing work and family led to her feeling completely burned out by 2022 — forcing her to temporarily stop working.

“I think the wake-up call was during bedtime with my kids … I was so burned out from giving so much energy to my patients all day that I just wanted to rush through bedtime to get any time to myself,” she said.

“And when I did get a moment to myself, I wasn’t doing anything productive, I just had to kind of veg out and sit on the couch.”

Family duties are not the only thing causing female physicians to burn out.

Researchers who conducted the 300,000-physician study found that the difference in burnout rates among male and female physicians was virtually the same across all career stages, suggesting that family obligations are not the main reason for the disparity.

Tasks physicians are expected — but not always paid — to perform at work beyond directly caring for patients can be draining, such as battling insurance companies, communicating with pharmacies and dealing with hospital or clinic administration.

“There is so much that happens in between patient visits that isn’t billed … that the healthcare system doesn’t recognize,” said Christine Kempton, a professor of hematology at Emory University.

Many doctors cite increased bureaucracy, reduced time seeing patients, and reduced insurance reimbursements as the main reasons behind a growing dissatisfaction with the job.

And that dissatisfaction is pushing the turnover rate among doctors to rise.

But sexism in the workplace also plays a role in why female doctors are more likely to stop practicing medicine than men, according to Gebhard.

That sexism comes in the form of lower pay, fewer promotions and less respect.

A 2020 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that female doctors spend more time with their patients than their male colleagues — clocking in 2.4 additional minutes per visit on average in 2017.

However, female doctors generally make less money, earning an estimated $2 million less during a 40-year career than their male colleagues.

In academic medicine, studies show that women are less likely to be promoted to associate or full professor positions than men even though they are more likely to pursue careers in the field.

Female physicians are also more likely to be delegated unpaid tasks like secretarial work, mentoring or committee work that do not necessarily contribute to promotions, according to Gebhard.

“Women physicians are paid less than men, work harder, have less resources, are less likely to be promoted and receive less respect in the workplace,” Gebhard told The Hill. “With all of these barriers to success in the workplace … it’s no wonder that women physicians are more likely to stop practicing than men.”

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