Women live longer — about five years longer, in general — than men, a statistic that is reflected across socioeconomic differences.
For both men and women, more education, income, and access to resources tend to translate into longer lifespans.
But a new study finds that women physicians lose this expected longevity advantage.
An analysis by Harvard Medical School researchers of mortality data for more than 3.6 million U.S. workers found that while women had lower mortality rates than men in most occupations, that advantage didn’t extend to women or Black physicians. Black women physicians had the highest mortality rate among doctors.
“Our team was interested in this topic because it’s generally assumed that physicians have lower mortality than other people in the country, but previous studies were limited,” says Ishani Ganguli, MD, MPH, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who was one of the study’s authors. Prior research used data from the 20th century and only included men.
The study found that women physicians, in particular, experienced higher mortality than male physicians did from tumors and chronic lower respiratory disease. The scope of the study stopped short of examining the reasons for the disparities, though study authors Christopher M. Worsham, MD, MPH, and Anupam “Bapu” Jena, MD, PhD, both Harvard Medical School professors, in a recent Time magazine article, shared their hypotheses about how systemic inequities in the field of medicine could contribute to this mortality disparity.
“If you have a profession that seems to systematically undercompensate or undervalue one group of people, there are implications on that workforce,” Jena says.
Other research into gender inequities in medicine gives more clues as to why women physicians have not yet reaped the same longevity benefits as their male counterparts. Women in medicine report more burnout, take on more home responsibilities, report experiencing sexual harassment more, get paid less, and are more likely to work part-time or quit medicine within a few years of completing training compared with men in medicine.
“Some things have improved since I was in medical school, but issues like microaggressions and home-work-life integration haven’t completely resolved,” says Kim Templeton, MD, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Kansas Medical Center and past president of the American Medical Women’s Association who studies gender disparities in medicine.
“Women, including physicians, are trained by society to want to take care of everyone else before themselves. That happens at work and at home,” she says. “When do women physicians have time to take care of themselves?”
The weight of discrimination
In 2019, women made up a slight majority (50.5%) of medical students for the first time, and in the 2024-25 academic year, they made up 54.9% of medical students.
A 2024 AAMC report found that women make up 45% of medical school faculty. But while they have increased their numbers in leadership positions, the representation lags behind what would be expected, given the number of women in the field. Just 25% of department chairs and 27% of deans were women in 2023, the report found.
Disparities in pay also persist. The study found that, on average, women who are clinical MD associate professors made 78 cents to the dollar, and clinical MD full professors made 83 cents to the dollar, compared with their male counterparts, as of 2023.
This is despite the fact that studies show women physicians tend to have similar, and sometimes better, clinical outcomes than their male colleagues.
Ganguli’s prior research has looked at how the workloads of men and women primary care physicians relate to compensation. One study, published in 2020, found that women, on average, earned less than men in the same practices because they conducted fewer patient visits, even though they spent more time with patients in visits, both per visit and per year. In another study, published in 2025, she found that for doctors working in value-based payment models, the wage gap reversed, in part because women doctors’ patients had fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations.
“We’re building an evidence base that suggests that the way we pay doctors may have an effect on the gender wage gap,” Ganguli says. “Women spend more time with patients in visits, and they spend more time [with patients] between visits — for example, in the patient portal — but, historically, this has not been compensated through the Medicare fee schedule. Reversing the wage gap isn’t necessarily the solution, but we can design payment models to better support the time and work that patients value. Under current fee-for-service payment models, women seem to put in that time, but at personal cost.”
On top of facing disparities in pay and promotion, women doctors often work under hostile conditions, studies have shown.
A 2022 AAMC report found that 34% of women faculty who responded to a survey reported experiencing sexual harassment, compared with 22% of faculty overall. Nearly a quarter of women respondents said they had been put down or treated in a condescending way because of their gender, compared with 2.8% of male respondents.
“The issue with microaggressions is that women are exposed to them so much, it almost feels like we face some sort of issue on a daily basis,” Templeton says. “You develop a position where you are on edge waiting for the next negative comment or behavior to happen.”
Family responsibilities
On top of challenges in the workplace, women physicians report that they carry a greater load when it comes to home and family responsibilities than men in the field do, particularly when it comes to parenting.
The challenges often start with pregnancy and childbirth. One 2019 survey of 844 physician mothers found that 73% of respondents thought that the maternity leave they were allowed was insufficient (the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education instituted a minimum of six weeks’ worth of paid family leave for medical residents in 2022). Survey respondents reported experiencing difficulty with finding time and private places for breast pumping at work, challenges with child care, and discrimination.
“Physician mothers who take maternity leave receive lower peer evaluation scores, lose thousands of dollars of potential income, are penalized with increased call [responsibilities] both before and after leave, and often encounter maternal discrimination in the workplace,” the researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center wrote.
Another study found that women physicians continue to face outsize caretaking expectations throughout their careers, including caring for elderly relatives, grandchildren, or ill spouses or adult children, suggesting that attention to reforming gendered workplace and home expectations must stretch beyond pregnancy and child care policies, says Templeton, the study’s lead author.
“There’s only so much time during the day; when you have those demands at work and at home, you get into a scenario that no matter where you are, you feel like you need to be somewhere else,” Templeton says. “That’s a recipe for burnout.”
Burnout
In 2019, the World Health Organization officially recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon characterized by energy depletion or exhaustion, cynicism related to one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.
And while men and women are affected by chronic workplace stress, studies show that women physicians report burnout symptoms at higher rates. In a 2022 American Medical Association survey, 57% of women physicians reported burnout compared with 47% of male physicians.
One review published in 2023 that studied gender differences in physician burnout, contributing factors, and possible solutions found that women physicians average more time spent directly with patients, spend more time working in electronic health records, and receive more messages from staff and patients than male physicians do.
Radmila Lyubarova, MD, a cardiologist at Albany Med Health System in New York, who led the burnout review, set out to study contributing factors and policies that can help reduce gender disparities in burnout.
As chair of the health system’s Department of Medicine Wellness and Burnout Task Force, she has helped educate the faculty on the signs of burnout and contributing factors. Among those factors are workload, control and flexibility over schedule, social supports available, and organizational culture and values, Lyubarova explains.
“This was our first step. It’s a very incremental process,” she says. “One important factor was having a culture of wellness in general.”
All academic health systems can and should take concrete steps to improve gender equity in medicine to improve wellbeing and the health of the workforce so they can provide optimal patient care, says Diana Lautenberger, director of gender equity initiatives at the AAMC.
A 2019 National Academy of Medicine discussion paper coauthored by Templeton and 11 other physicians suggests organizational interventions that health systems can implement to help reduce the additional burden many women physicians face. Among them:
- Create reporting structures for sexual harassment and discrimination, and follow through with accountability for perpetrators.
- Implement policies that allow for better work-life integration, including time and space for lactation, access to child care, flexible work schedules, and adequate family leave.
- Encourage those experiencing mental health challenges to get help, reduce stigma, and advocate for licensing policies that don’t penalize doctors for seeking mental health care.
- Facilitate professional mentorship programs focused on women, as well as peer groups that allow support for women physicians in similar life and professional stages.
“As more and more women are entering medicine, institutions should address inequities as a strategy to retain and engage their workforce,” Lautenberger says. “We will need every physician thriving in order to meet the incredible health care challenges we face.”
