Too Many Female Doctors Go Part-Time Or Stop Working — Why That’s A Big Problem

Women are more likely than men to cite family as a consideration in their work status, a new study of physicians shows



'Medicine has a big opportunity and, really, an obligation to set an example for how to support women and families,' the study's lead author said.

Physicians aren’t immune to the trade-offs working women face, new research shows.

Female doctors are more likely than their male peers to shift to part-time work or stop working a few years after completing their medical training, according to a recent study published in the journal JAMA Network Open. Women, moreover, are more likely than men to cite family as a consideration in determining their work status.

Despite progress regarding gender roles and women’s workplace rights, the authors wrote, “today’s young women physicians still struggle to have it all and therefore reduce their work hours at substantially higher rates than men in an effort to reduce work-family conflict.”

“It’s very common for people to see this and say some women are just choosing to put family first — which is wonderful and a great choice for anyone who wants to make that. But in reality, what we’re seeing is that often there isn’t choice,” lead study author Elena Frank, the director of the University of Michigan’s Intern Health Study, said in a statement.

‘Medicine has a big opportunity and, really, an obligation to set an example for how to support women and families.’
—Lead study author Elena Frank, director of the University of Michigan’s Intern Health Study
“Medicine has a big opportunity and, really, an obligation to set an example for how to support women and families,” she added.

The U.S. is projected to experience a shortage of between 46,900 and 121,900 physicians in both primary care and specialty care by the year 2032, according to a report published in April by the Association of American Medical Colleges.


The attrition of full-time female physicians could make matters even worse, the authors suggested, and not just because of the blow to leadership diversity in health care: Research shows that hospital patients treated by female doctors are less likely than those treated by male doctors to die or be readmitted within a month of being discharged.

In fact, one 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that female heart-attack patients had better survival rates when treated by female doctors than by male doctors. Female patients’ mortality rates decreased when their male doctors had more female colleagues, the research found, and when they had more experience caring for female patients.

Research shows that hospital patients treated by female doctors are less likely than those treated by male doctors to die or be readmitted within a month of being discharged.
The present study’s authors analyzed data from 344 physicians across a variety of specialties — just over half of whom were women — who were enrolled in the Intern Health Study between March 2007 and June 2013 and surveyed about their employment status and gender in August 2016.

The authors found that female doctors were far more likely than their male counterparts to not be working full-time (22.6% versus 3.6%), with a clear disparity between women with kids and men with kids (30.6% versus 4.6%). In the first year after medical training, men and women had a 9.6 percentage-point gap in their full-time employment — but that gender gap stretched to 38.7 points at six years post-training.

Women working full-time, especially those with children, were more likely than their male peers to have considered part-time work. And some 77.5% of female doctors who worked part-time or didn’t work at all “cited family as the factor that influenced their employment status decision,” the authors wrote.

In fact, word clouds created by the study authors found stark differences in men’s and women’s deciding factors for working part-time or full-time. For women, said senior author Constance Guille, an associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, “the major factor was child-care responsibilities, balancing work and family and children.”

But for men, Frank said, “the big words that jump out are financial — need money, loans.” “I don’t think you could even find the word child on the male one,” she added. (“Family,” however, is displayed prominently.)

A key takeaway from the study, Guille said, is that physicians who are parents need better support systems — including resources like work flexibility, paid parental leave and on-site day care. Frank also prescribed a cultural shift in how organizations approach benefits like parental leave.

“Men often have access to leave, but the institutional culture often pushes against them actually taking it,” Frank said. “It’s part of the leadership’s role to actually set an example that makes it OK to use these policies once they’re actually in place.”

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