Overestimating women’s representation in medicine

Key findings

Paralleling trends in other countries, in the UK women now make up over half of all medical school graduates. However, recruitment of female doctors to several specialty areas is not keeping pace with their recruitment to medicine in general. For instance, women are well represented in general practice/primary care, yet remain under-represented in medical and surgical specialties (eg, in surgical specialties, less than 15% of consultants are women).

Despite women’s continuing under-representation in several areas of medicine (including some of the highest paying and most prestigious areas), their more prominent representation in general practice and medical schools may be prompting some in the field to mistakenly infer that women are now well represented across the board or better represented than they actually are in several areas. This is important to consider, partly because if individuals overestimate women’s representation they may be less willing to support policies and initiatives that aim to further promote gender equality in the profession. They may regard them as no longer necessary, for instance. 

Indeed, previous research on this topic, although limited in scope, demonstrates that when individuals overestimate women’s representation in a field (eg, in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) and in politics), they show less support for initiatives that aim to help women in those fields. Thus, medical professionals who overestimate the true progress that has been made in women’s representation in the field may be at highest risk of undermining it.

Our research finds that medical professionals tend to overestimate women’s true representation in several different areas of medicine (general practice, medical specialties, surgical specialties) and in various roles (consultants/general practitioners, trainees, medical school graduates). Moreover, these erroneous estimates predicted a decreased willingness to support gender-based initiatives, particularly among men in the field. Specifically, while female respondents’ (over)estimates were unrelated to their level of support, male respondents’ tendency to overestimate the proportion of women in medicine predicted lower support for gender-based initiatives.

While some progress has been made in gender representation in the medical field, this research illustrates that there are still barriers to gender equality efforts and identifies who within the field is focally maintaining these barriers. It is those individuals (particularly men) who overestimate the true progress that has been made in women’s representation who are at highest risk of undermining it.