Here Come the Couples

Thirteen years ago, Arnold Relman, in an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, announced Here come the women [1]. And so they have. The proportion of women entering U.S. medical schools increased from 5% in 1949 (and just 9% in 1970) to 42% in 1992 [2]. The wave of women entering the profession is moving into practice but has not yet reached senior ranks; 27% of physicians younger than 35 years are women, compared with only 8% of those 55 to 66 years [3]. Nevertheless, it is only a matter of time before what was once nearly an all-male profession, with all that implies, includes women and men in similar proportions.

Now the profession has entered the next era. The couples are coming. In the past, about half of the relatively few women in medicine married male physicians [4]. Because the numbers of women were small, physician couples were rare. As the number of women increased more recently, the tendency for about half to marry physicians has persisted [5]. If this pattern continues, soon nearly half of all young physicians will be married to each other. Sixty percent of female academic physicians are already married to other physicians [6]. It only stands to reason that this would happen. As a colleague in Mexico City said of his marriage to a physician, We were so busy during training, who else would we meet? Most female …