A Flattened Curve: National Trends of Women Physicians and Residents in Surgery Over the Last Decade

Women comprise over half of enrolled United States medical students. Yet, they continue to be under-represented in the active physician workforce, particularly among surgical specialties. This study investigates recent trends in the representation of women across surgical specialties in comparison to nonsurgical specialties within the US physician and resident workforce.

Data on active physicians and residents across 48 specialties were extracted from the Association of American Medical College's biennial (2010-2021) and annual reports (2018-2022), respectively. Descriptive statistics were performed on the proportion of physicians who were women in surgical and nonsurgical specialties. Poisson regressions were utilized with proportion of women as the outcome and specialty and year as the predictors.

In 2021, 37.1% of all active physicians (946,790) were women, with a higher proportion of women in nonsurgical (38.4%) compared to surgical specialties (29.1%). In the resident workforce, women constituted 47.3% of the total workforce (149,296) in 2022, with a relatively comparable proportion of women in nonsurgical (47.4%) and surgical specialties (47.0%). The rate of yearly change decreased significantly (P < 0.01) for women in all surgical specialties except obstetrics and gynecology (1 of 10), with nonsurgical specialties as reference.

Although the proportion of women in surgery has increased over the last decade, this is the first study to identify that the rate of yearly change in women in the active physician and resident workforce is decreasing significantly in almost all (9 of 10) surgical specialties relative to nonsurgical specialties. This emphasizes the urgent need for systemic interventions that address the major barriers in recruitment and retention of women surgeons.