Are there too many female medical graduates? Yes

doi:10.1136/bmj.39505.491065.94

BMJ 2008;336:748 (5 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.39505.491065.94

Head to Head

Are there too many female medical graduates? Yes

Brian McKinstry, senior research fellow

¹ Community Health Sciences: General Practice Section, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9DX

brian.mckinstry@ed.ac.uk

UK universities are now producing more female doctors than male.Brian McKinstry argues we are risking future staffing problems,but Jane Dacre (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39505.566701.94) thinks thereis still some way to go before we reach true equality

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Too many female graduates are bad for medicine, just as toomany male ones have been in the past. The numbers of men andwomen entering medical school should roughly reflect the numbersin society. The case for this is simply on grounds of equalopportunity. But there are also strong economic and workforceplanning reasons. I will argue this largely from the perspectiveof my own specialty, general practice, which illustrates moststrongly the impact of the feminisation of medicine.

Over the past 30 years the proportion of women attending medicalschools has steadily risen in many countries including the UK,US, Canada, and Australia.¹ ² In 2002-3, all UK medical schoolshad more female students than male, with the percentage of womenexceeding 65% in some.³ This partly reflects the increasingnumber of women applying for medical courses and their increasingexamination success in science. For many years the . . . [Full text of this article]

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