Gender in Medical Training and Academic Medicine

Abstract

There has been an increase in the number of female doctors worldwide. Women now represent half of all medical students, with almost the same numbers of men and women becoming physicians. There is a pool of talented women in our midst, and it is our responsibility as leaders to find those individuals and groom them for progress. However, residency training and academic education still resemble the historical model when there were few women in medicine. Gender differences in medical specialty choices can cause a maldistribution of doctors by specialty and geographical area, which could cause significant problems at the national health care system level. Major challenges facing female physicians include gender discrimination and sexual harassment, and work/family conflicts. Women are largely under-represented in academic medicine and experience discrimination in the academic environments. Recent issues about related to the “feminization of medicine” raise important questions forabout how academic medicine deals with gender issues. To better accommodate the needs of female doctors and ensure that they will have successful careers, structural and cultural changes to medical educations are needed.