As you can see, the total number of M.D’s awarded by American medical schools has changed hardly at all since 1980 (which is pretty amazing given that the nation’s population grew by roughly 80 million people during that time). Back then, medical schools were graduating roughly 11,500 men and 3,500 women per year. Subsequently, society became more just and civilized and women were given great opportunity. Because both the number of medical schools and the number of annual M.D.’s are tightly limited via cost barriers to entry, regulation, and professional practice, this created approximately a one-for-one substitution effect so that by 2009 the numbers were almost equal: 8,000 men to 7,800 women.
I am glad that there is enough gender-equality that half of new doctors are now female, but female doctors put in less time on the job than male doctors (on average) because they are in a family-friendly occupation which allows them to take more time off for children and they take more time off than men do. This trend further reduces the amount of doctoring that happens and increases the need for more doctors. Doctors earn a lot of money and more people would love to go to medical school if the doctors who control medical education would let more people get educated. In contrast, law schools have increased the number of slots to accommodate more women and they can still fit in men like Saul Goodman (as the link shows, the guy is almost too ridiculous to be true).
...It’s easier and cheaper to open a new law school than a new medical school, pass the bar, etc. So what we see here is the number of men getting law degrees per year holding constant (albeit declining in per-capita terms) at around 23,000, give or take, while the number of women nearly doubled, from 11,000 to 20,000.
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