Women in healthcare: historical trends and social stigmas

Have you heard this riddle before?

While it may seem clear to some that the doctor is the mother of the boy, to some people this answer is not easy to grasp. Some assuming it's a step-father, that the boy has two fathers, etc., and are easier to assuming that the boy has multiple dads than the concept that a woman can be a surgeon.

When looking into how an undergraduate education will prepare women for the work force, it is very important to understand some of the most common STEM based professions. Some of the most common science education based professions include those in the health care field. For example, 78.4% of the healthcare field is women, encompassing 92.8% of medical assistants, 96.6% of dental assistants, 64.6% of physical therapy assistants or aides, etc. However, despite the vast majority of the field being women, the power dynamics are very clear. Out of the 46 fortune 500 healthcare companies, only three have females in top leadership roles and women account for only 14.6 of executive officers and board directors.30 Even though women encompass 93% of all nursing jobs in the United States, the Journal of the American Medical Association published in 2015 that male nurses, on average, make $5,100 more compared to their female counterparts. This emphasizes how, even in female-dominated STEM based careers, there is a clear pay advantage for men.31 This gap continues when you look at the power roles within the health care fields themselves. For example, while nurses are most often women, historically doctors have been men.

It is important to analyze the experiential differences between the sexes within these fields as well. When looking at the statistics of females in medical school programs and residencies, many differences are clear. One stark detail about female medical residents is the steep rise in depression related symptoms when entering the medical profession, mostly attributed to work-life conflict. The unequal distribution of household and childcare duties plays a dominant role in the comparative stress levels of women and men in the same job environment, especially when this environment is considered one of the most mentally and physically grueling professional periods. While there has been a dramatic increase of women physicians in the United states (7% in 1966, 33% of current day practicing physicians and about 50% of physicians-in-training), the lack of balance of out-of-work life negatively impacts the women in this field. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that while working an 80-hour medical residency work week, female residents spent an additional 9 hours per week on domestic activities compared to their male counterparts, and are more likely to take time off when a child is sick or school is closed.32 These differences, though not directly related to work, can dramatically impact the success a woman has in her field based solely on availability of time.

In regard to respect in the medical field, the same study noted how women physicians are differentially treated by others. The female doctors are often mistaken for nurses, lab technicians or pharmacists, even while wearing the white coat and introducing themselves as “Doctor”. Another major note of this study is how patients often disregard ranking between physicians in the room, looking towards a male character over the female physician even if the female has the ranking authority (a physician compared to a medical student or resident, for example).33

While in themselves these situations may seen at most annoying, they culminate along with other reasons presented in this research to the gender disparities of undergraduate women in STEM. If women are pursuing science based degrees in order to best prepare themselves for a future in health care, this has implications about how statistics should be analyzed at an undergraduate level. Overall, trends have been dramatically increasing in the past few decades in regard to how women are portrayed in health care, and I have hopes that this trend will continue to equality. With this hope, it is still pertinent to recognize how small social stigmas directly impact these women, and how important it is to both notice and negate these stigmas in everyday life.

To read more about a Dichotomy of Realities - An Analysis of Gender and STEM at the University of Wyoming, click here.

References can be found here.