Young woman, I have some good news. Marry that Doctor. Seriously. He is, at least in the USA, at lower risk of divorcing you than that lawyer or that medical administrator. Far better marry that GP than a suit.
From the article, there is a corollary: young man, if you marry that cute female doctor, ensure that she keeps her hours low. From the paper….
Using large, nationally representative survey data collected by the US census from 2008 to 2013, we compared both the prevalence and incidence of divorce among physicians and other healthcare and non-healthcare professionals.
Our study had several findings. Firstly, divorce among US physicians is no more common than in other healthcare professions and non-healthcare professions. In fact, the prevalence and incidence of divorce among physicians were similar to pharmacists and dentists and substantially lower than that of nurses, healthcare executives, lawyers, and other non-healthcare professionals. Despite evidence that professional obligations among physicians, including long and sometimes unpredictable work hours, may conflict with personal and family life, we found no evidence that divorce among physicians was more common as a result. Secondly, female physicians were substantially more likely to be divorced than male physicians. Hours worked per week were positively correlated with divorce only for female physicians and not for male physicians, suggesting that differences in divorce rates between male and female physicians may be partly attributable to differential responses of divorce to hours worked.
The problem is that about 60% of each medical school graduating class is… female. There are similar proportions in dentistry and pharmacy. Among nurses, about 80-90% of each class are women. And these are more vulnerable to issues relating to hours.
I know plenty of professional women. Most need a wife. And many burn out trying to do that job and be the mother to their children and a lover to their husband. We forget, at our peril, that running a household is a full-time job.
We have set up generations of women to fail. We need to, again, as it was, encourage young professional women to take time out when their children are small, have social and institutional support for the couple, and minimal retraining to rejoin. We need to stop looking at the peak — those driven to the Everest of their profession, frequently at considerable cost to colleagues and families. We need to plan so we are good enough. As parents, as spouses, as human beings. And as doctors, nurses, pharmacists and professionals.
Meanwhile, somewhere in America, a male physician is being frivorced by his unhaaaapy wife for cash and prizes.
Who speaks for him? Who warned him of danger before he signed up “til death or her unhaaaapiness do us part”?
“We” did not set women up for failure. Some of “us” thought that mandating 50+% of med school students be female was a really bad idea at the time. We were shouted down with namecalling, by “we” who knew so much better.
I’m tired of being blamed for things I did not do, things that I even inveighed against. How about you? Tired of it yet?
However difficult it may be for a 30-something female medical doctor who can’t find a husband because of her hypergamy, she’s still alive and can make choices. She could even choose to settle for a beta…and then what?
Somewhere in America a man being ground up in the divorce machine will kill himself in the next 72 hours. Who will speak for him?
Well, “we” won’t, that is for sure. Men are disposable objects. Not humans. “We” say so, therefore it must be true.
I’m not merely a mental health doctor (Psychiatrist), I run the local training scheme, married a pediatric trainee who left me after she burnt out and became a doc in a box. Ended up raising the kids solo.
And I protested this stuff too. I’ve lived it. So, yeah. The “We”, in this case, is the profession. Because what has happened has failed kids.
Should add that both boys have or are doing the one year intense premedicine course — one is in an allied training. And he is releived he is not following in the family trade.
I recall your history, Chris. Thank you for clarifying who “we” is. In the US “we” is the reigning elite. It was Clinton who simply mandated “50%”, thereby guaranteeing that quality of doctors would decline.
20 years on we see exactly that. Medical schools are stuffed, the limiting factor is residencies, and as everywhere else on the planet women tend to go into pediatrics, gyno, etc. while a shortage of surgeons gets worse. Plus as everywhere else, women can’t do the long hours, so they cut back.
Every woman in med school is taking a seat from an equally qualified or better qualified man who is far more likely to do the job even when it means 70 hours / week.
And none of this changes the facts about marriage 2.0, the divorce industry, the male suicide rate, etc. nor will it help your male doctor when his till-death-or-unhaaaapiness-do-us-part wife decides to detonate his life. Encouraging women to go prey on male doctors, as you did originallly, is not so good.
Yeah, Chris, he wont’ divorce her, but the reverse? 65% of divorces in the US are filed by women, a tiny fraction of them for anything substantial such as adultery or abandonment or abuse.
I was reading in the NYT that even though medical schools are now 60/40 F/M ratio, that 50% of those physicians go to part time within a decade or after their residency drop out of the medical field altogether! This anesthatist who wrote the article was so bold enough to suggest to the women that if they cannot put in the long and erratic hours the profession requires, then they should not have got into the medical field in the first place. The article also stated that this had led to a shortage of doctors in the US. It is no wonder that I see a lot of foreign physicians over here. I have also heard that veterinary school is about 85% female and makes me wonder women would be interested in becoming vets because they have to do things other than treating the neighborhood pets! In the accountancy profession, women now account for 80% as well.
My (female, originally from China) GP shares a practice with another (female, Chinese American) GP so that they can both work part-time and be home with their young children the rest of the time. Not sure about my doc, but the partner doc’s kids go to the same charter school mine do, and do the “four days at home” option. My doc’s husband is also a doctor – he’s a dermatologist.
So, essentially she holds a PT job and he holds a FT job. Not terrible, in today’s economy. GPs have pretty regular hours.
Women become vets in droves because they love animals and want to work with them. I have known SOOOOOOO many teenaged girls who dream of being a vet, far more than actually get into or finish veterinary school.
Hearthie: my GP now works one day a week, because she has taken an academic job (she had a MB then a PhD, then changed to GP — and how has gone to academic GP practice). One of the reasons I survived when the boys were little is that I did my university work in the afternoon and left at four, not six.
The medical council in NZ insists that you are current ie you have done your CME (minimum of 50 hours every year) and work at least a day a week. So you cannot take tome off when you have babies.
So a lot of medical couples are going part-time: as a result NZ has maximized the size of their medical school (there are limits driven by the number of training rotations that exist) and Australia has doubled the number of medical schools. Because working 70 hours a week is incompatible with children.
Beause working 70 hours a week is incompatible with children for women.
FIFY.
I’ve known more than a few men who put in those kind of hours while establishing a career, but they had a reliable, trustworthy wife managing the home.
What we have is a decaying medical system with more and more semi-competent people working fewer hours, but hey, at least teh wimmenz get to wear a stethoscope and have “MD” next to their name. So if the sole purpose of Western civilization is “make women happy by providing fried ice” then it’s succeeding.
Funny thing is, they aren’t happy. The scrips for anti-depressants are more and more common, women report lower happiness than any time since the 1960’s. Could have something to do with hypergamy, maybe?
So we are steadily wrecking the medical system across the industrialized world, and for what?
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