Gender, family status, and career patterns of graduates of the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine

Abstract

In 1986 the authors sent a questionnaire to 745 physicians who had graduated between 1973 and 1985 from The University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine. The survey obtained information on the graduates' status as parents, the "breaks" they had taken from their practices, and the hours per week they devoted to direct patient care, in order to observe what relationship the graduates' gender and status as parents had on the other variables. The women were far more likely to have taken breaks for parental leave, but the differences in the frequencies of breaks taken by the men and the women for other reasons were less striking. The women were working fewer hours in direct patient-care settings, and those women who were parents and under 35 years old spent fewer hours on patient care than did the men (from all age groups) who were parents. The authors discuss their findings in terms of the impacts of age and cohort effects and the possible lessening of gender-based differences in present-day physicians' practices.