Women currently make up roughly 1/2 of every medical school class in the United States. This isn't always true; at Albert Einstein, they make up something like 58% of each incoming class, and at other schools, they make up a smaller percentage. That's good, right?
Well, here's the problem. A number of women, after graduating from medical school and going through their residency, become part-time physicians. "Any is better than none," you might say. Consider this.
It costs something like $1 million to train a physician. These costs come from the medical education they get in medical school through residency. They pay usually between $150K and $250K for this education, and get paid during internship and residency. Many take out loans for all this, but that's another story.
Now, after all this money being put in to train this person, they decide that they want to work only part time. Maybe 30 hours a week compared to the 60 or more a full time physician will work (yes, few actually work 40 hours a week). They do this during an impending shortage of physicians, especially in primary care, where many women end up working.
See the problem? They take up a spot in the medical school class, which sometimes 500+ other people were competing for (yes; some schools even get 10K or more applications in any given cycle, and their classes are usually 200 people or less). Then they don't work the full amount expected of them.
So why don't medical schools increase their class sizes? Well, they are. I know my state school just increased their class size from 120 or so up to nearly 160. Unfortunately, there's only so much many schools can increase, due to space limitations, staff hiring, and even cadavers in gross anatomy. But if half of each class goes on to work part-time...
With all that said, I don't think women should be banned form becoming physicians. However, I think all women considering this career should take full note the time expense it requires, and be willing to work full-time in that career for many years. Yes, taking some time off to recover from child-birth is ok, but doing minimal work all the time isn't going to help our country deal with the physician shortage, especially in primary care.
What do you think?
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I think you are making an unfair assessment of women and working part time.
I agree that women should be aware of the time commitment, but I'm sure they are. They spent how many years in in training before they became a doctor?
It isn't like the women are saying "Okay, I just spent most of my youth in school and training to become a doctor. Now I'm going to have a baby and quit my job."
And as for the achievements of men with children versus women with children, the fact is that the role of a woman in the "nuclear family" is to put the children first while the man goes and works. And while I'm sure that it is not always the truth, I think that is is a factor. There are stay at home dads, but the majority are stay at home mothers or mothers that sacrifice their career in order to take care of the children.
And by working part time I don't think that women are putting the money spent and the place they took in class in the garbage, I think that at least they work. They could have decided to stay at home permanently or work from home. That would be more of a waste.
Now I don't speak for every woman, I don't speak for anyone but myself here by saying that women aren't wasting the investments placed on them by working part time, they are just balancing their lives out.
To argue that men have contributed more to medical society is just bull because men have been doctors since it first became a profession, whereas women have only been allowed the opportunity since about 1840. So obviously men would have a greater impact in medicine.
You have given no overlying reason for the part time working of women other than the implied child care. You are making it seem as if women are lazy, which is possibly the case in some women, but most likely not the overlying factor(s).
You clearly don't know me, cause those who do know me would see the irony in this post.
I wrote this after I read a criticism about letting women into medicine, and this is the basic argument that the person presented--more women enter medicine and then work part time than men do. From personal experience, I know my boss (a male doctor) says that there are two female doctors in a practice nearby, but since they both work part-time, they are so rarely available for appointments. He also says that no one should be working part-time in medicine, because it is such a time-demanding specialty. In fact, one of the cardiologists in town apparently could not leave city limits for 14 years, because there was such a high risk of one of his patients falling ill, and the time required to get back to town would be too great, and the patient would die.
The percentage of women in primary care is also disproportionally high, as compared to some of the other, more time demanding specialties. Since primary care is the field that we're lacking doctors in the most, the women who do eventually go on to become part-time physicians are taking away from a needed area, especially since they took that place in medical school that someone else who would work full time would fill.
Of course, if you read the article I randomly put into the blog, you'll find that the counterargument is that men have higher costs for poor performance, litigation, re-education, and rehabilitation. But mentioning all that would have defeated the purpose of the blog.
~C
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I imagine it would be the same case for many majors. Those who major in Math may not do anything with it. It's unfortunate that some of these people take up highly competitive positions in class and don't end up as a physician in the future. Those who didn't get the spot in class may have done better in that field.
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But in most undergraduate majors, you're not competing for a spot in the class. Maybe to get into the university, but not necessarily the major. Of course, there are some exceptions, but they're pretty rare. Medicine, on the other hand, whether you're talking about nursing or medical school, has only a limited number of spots, and huge numbers of people don't get accepted into ANY program every year, or ever. Also, they're kinda fundamentally different... there aren't specific jobs for most majors (engineering is an exception, as are some of the performing arts). You can major in biology and go because a scientist, a doctor, a teacher, an administrator, etc... But when you go into a professional school, you are trained to go into a certain career. There may be some options in that career (for example, you can become a pediatrician or a surgeon if you go to medical school), but it trains you for that specific profession.
~C
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