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 [1]? 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?