---
title: "Women in medicine"
chunk: 4/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_medicine"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:03:52.958164+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

 In 1540, Henry VIII of England granted the charter for the Company of Barber-Surgeons; while this led to the specialization of healthcare professions (i.e. surgeons and barbers), women were barred from professional practice. Women did continue to practice during this time without formal training or recognition in England and eventually North America for the next several centuries.
Women's participation in the medical professions was generally limited by legal and social practices during the decades while medicine was professionalizing. Women openly practiced medicine in the allied health professions (nursing, midwifery, etc.), and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women made significant gains in access to medical education and medical work through much of the world. These gains were sometimes tempered by setbacks; some have documented a decline in women physicians in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, such that there were fewer women physicians in 1950 than there were in 1900. A 2026 study attributed this decline to closures of schools with traditionally high female enrollments, higher admission standards for female applicants to medical schools than male applicants, and the refusal of some medical schools, such as Harvard Medical School, to admit women at all.
Through the latter half of the twentieth century, women made gains generally across the board. In the United States, for instance, women were 9% of total US medical school enrollment in 1969; this had increased to 20% in 1976. By 1985, women constituted 16% of practicing American physicians.
At the beginning of the 21st century in industrialized nations, women have made significant gains, but have yet to achieve parity throughout the medical profession. Women have achieved parity in medical school in some industrialized countries, since 2003 forming the majority of the United States medical school applicants. In 2007–2008, women accounted for 49% of medical school applicants and 48.3% of those accepted. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) 48.4% (8,396) of medical degrees awarded in the US in 2010–2011 were earned by women, an increase from 26.8% in 1982–1983. While more women are taking part in the medical field, a 2013–2014 study reported that there are significantly fewer women in leadership positions within the academic realm of medicine. This study found that women accounted for 16% of deans, 21% of the professors, and 38% of faculty, as compared to their male counterparts.
The practice of medicine remains disproportionately male overall. In industrialized nations, the recent parity in gender of medical students has not yet trickled into parity in practice. In many developing nations, neither medical school nor practice approach gender parity. Moreover, there are skews within the medical profession: some medical specialties, such as surgery, are significantly male-dominated, while other specialties are significantly female-dominated, or are becoming so. For example, in the United States, As of 2006 female physicians outnumber male physicians in pediatrics and female residents outnumber male residents in family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pathology, and psychiatry. In several different areas of medicine (general practice, medical specialties, surgical specialties) and in various roles, medical professionals tend to overestimate women's true representation, and this correlates with a decreased willingness to support gender-based initiatives among men, impeding further progress towards gender parity.
Women continue to dominate in nursing. In 2000, 94.6% of registered nurses in the United States were women. In health care professions as a whole in the US, women numbered approximately 14.8 million, as of 2011.
Biomedical research and academic medical professions—i.e., faculty at medical schools—are also disproportionately male. Research on this issue, called the "leaky pipeline" by the National Institutes of Health and other researchers, shows that while women have achieved parity with men in entering graduate school, a variety of discrimination causes them to drop out at each stage in the academic pipeline: graduate school, postdoc, faculty positions, achieving tenure; and, ultimately, in receiving recognition for groundbreaking work.