The X-factor

Equal numbers is not equality

Increasingly, data are showing that women work at their profession fewer hours than men. Regardless of age, the 2007 National Physician Survey shows that women physicians report spending 47.5 hours per week at work versus 53.8 hours for men. This gap widens by almost 13 hours per week for women who have children under 5 years old at home; the gap narrows to a difference of only 1.3 hours per week once children are grown, particularly if there are no dependants. In fact, both men and women younger than my baby-boomer age group work fewer hours. They are seeking—and achieving—a different balance between professional and personal lives than did my generation. (Although we often talk about work–life balance, we are fortunate in having a satisfying, remunerative, absorbing profession—surely our work as physicians is part of our life.)

Reports of this trend in medicine have occasionally tended to blame women physicians for the shortage of physicians overall. When there is a shortage of family physicians, it is easy for some to suggest that fewer women in medicine would solve the problem.

At the other end of the spectrum, some reports describe women’s practice patterns in a way that suggests women have a monopoly on caring. Women do, on average, spend slightly longer on each patient encounter and engage in more preventive maneuvers.1 However, men who choose family medicine, in my experience, are also making a choice of career where patient-physician relationships are central; they themselves are often the epitome of caring communicators.

Then there are those who controversially denounce the increasing participation of women in the profession by suggesting that the profession itself has consequently become devalued—whatever women do, goes this line of thinking, is less valued by society. Women are doing family medicine, so it must be less valued in our society.