Male and female physician career patterns: specialty choices and graduate training.

During the decade of the seventies the proportion of entering U.S. medical school classes consisting of women increased from 9 to 25%. National data on 74,265 physicians from seven graduation cohorts (1970 to 1976) reveal that this phenomenon has resulted in a trend toward convergence of male and female career patterns in several important areas: specialty choice during graduate medical education, patterns of switching specialties and subspecialization, and duration of graduate medical training. In addition, whereas both sexes show an increased tendency to select general internal medicine and family practice, the lower rate at which women subspecialize within pediatrics and the increasing rate at which they select obstetrics/gynecology suggest a shifting orientation toward primary care among women.