Women as doctors, wives, and mothers.

The number of women choosing medicine as a career has increased significantly over the last 20 years. However, unlike their male colleagues, married women physicians also carry and seem to expect to carry the major responsibility for household and child care. As a result, they suffer role conflict in trying to be superdocs, superwives, and supermoms, and role strain in combining their multiple roles. More networking among women physicians; seminars for dual career couples; reduced hour training programs for both men and women; paternity as well as maternity leave; effective on-call sharing; housekeeping agencies for professionals; and a crisis hotline for female doctors are suggested as ways to ease their role overload.