A woman in PA school probably has an easier time finding a doctor than a fellow student to marry. When my wife attended 6 years ago, there were 5 or 6 men in th

A woman in PA school probably has an easier time finding a doctor than a fellow student to marry. When my wife attended 6 years ago, there were 5 or 6 men in the class of 80. I suspect more of those women are married to doctors than classmates; I can't report comprehensively, but I know of two married to doctors and none married to classmates. An MD is just a really shortsighted decision for many women who would like to have and spend time with multiple kids. If you're hitting all wickets in ideal timing (assuming HS grad at 18), you could finish med school at 26, then residency sometime around 30, which is already feeling quite late to have your first child. And the residencies I hear about don't sound like great environments for a healthy pregnancy, so maybe make conception at 30, baby probably at 31. And now you have loans to pay off and high earning potential, just as you're wanting to spend time with young children. As this is only baby #1. And hopefully these women already have husbands lined up, despite that being a significant difficulty for woman doctors. It gets much worse when you talk to women who, for various reasons, are still applying and hoping to get in at age 25 or 26. And then I've heard 20-something men talk about applying for medical school in the same conversation where they ask coworkers about part time work schedules and allude to wanting not to work very much; it's like their perceptions of life have a single scalar parameter of success, years of medical education, and they can't see all the stuff off the sides of that grind of a narrow track.