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Obviously no one can know the future with certainty. But several articles make statements regarding more women graduating with medical degrees than men and that in the near future more doctors will be women rather than men.

From here

For many years now, Canada’s population of female doctors has been growing at a far greater rate than its male doctors.

However they don't cite any sources.

From here

New research asks if medicine is fast becoming a woman’s domain. In the UK, female doctors are set to outnumber their male counterparts by 2017,

Though this isn't Canada.

From here

And because the proportion of family practitioners who are male continues to decline — about 60 per cent of new medical students are female — we can look forward to the problem of accessing care getting worse.

This doesn't have references.

Are there any reliable sources that have statistics regarding the amount of medical students who intend to work in Canada, and compare the ratios of males to females or something like that? If the topic is too broad I'm most curious about GPs.

Brythan
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Celeritas
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  • Because of immigration, the population of doctors might not be caused only by the number of students. – ChrisW Apr 17 '15 at 22:25

2 Answers2

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According to the Canadian Medical Association's statistics (which counts all doctors in Canada, not just CMA members), as of January 2015, there are more male doctors than there are female doctors.

Out of the 78,657 doctors in Canada, 30,814 are female, 47,766 are male, and 77 are unknown.

Looking at only doctors under 35, women significantly outnumber men 3,693 to 2,387, and of of the 2,804 new MDs in 2014, 1,584 were women. Additionally, the majority of new doctors have been women since 2001. As such, it does look like female doctors will eventually outnumber male doctors if the current trend continues.

Looking at specialties, women currently make up a majority of some specialties, such as Geriatric Medicine and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, whereas men make up a majority of almost all surgical specialisties and also form the majority of Family Medicine practitioners.

Though CMA's statistics don't seem to include an age/sex/specialty breakdown to verify the 3rd statement as to whether the percentage of female family medicine specialists is growing.

rjzii
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Compro01
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  • The wording "a majority of them have been women since 2001" is a bit unclear. It seems to say that sex changing surgery is becoming so common that's not reasonable to assume that in a certain group the number of people born women is close to the number of (current) women. – Bakuriu Apr 20 '15 at 06:00
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    @Bakuriu - What I mean by that is that there have been more new female MDs than there have been new male MDs in every year since 2001. [For example, in 2014, 56.5% of new MDs in Canada were female](https://www.cma.ca/Assets/assets-library/document/en/advocacy/25-MD_awarded_by_sex.pdf). – Compro01 Apr 20 '15 at 06:24
  • Yes, but grammatically the *them* in that sentence refers to the *women* just mentioned, not to the doctors that are only mentioned at the beginning of the sentence. This is what I meant by unclear wording. – Bakuriu Apr 20 '15 at 13:03
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    Besides considering the gender ratio among doctors entering the field, one should also consider gender differences in the rate at which doctors *leave* the field. – Nate Eldredge Apr 28 '19 at 01:26
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To update this with January 2018 data -- still untrue:

ALL PHYSICIANS  
Female:   35,372   42.0%
Male:     48,860   58.0%
Unknown:      28    0.0%
Nat
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Roger
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  • Since the question is about what will happen in the future you haven't shown it to be untrue by quoting current statistics. – DJClayworth Apr 24 '19 at 17:21
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    The claim in 2015 was that it would happen "soon", so I'd like to think I have. Fortunately we can let the votes decide. – Roger Apr 24 '19 at 17:34
  • None of the claims that the question is based on give a timeframe. They point towards ongoing trends and what that suggests about the future. A single snapshot from a couple years later doesn't do anything to dispute those claims as "untrue", considering "soon" hasn't been clearly defined. – JMac Apr 24 '19 at 18:28
  • If anything this shows ~4500 more female and ~1100 more male doctors, which is consistent with the trends in the other answer; if anything, it shows a faster rate. I don't see what this answer adds. – Bryan Krause Apr 24 '19 at 20:28
  • +1: This answer provides feedback from a prediction about what will happen "_soon_" 3 years later. Since this is exactly the information I'd want to see upon looking at an older question like this, it seems like a constructive contribution. – Nat Apr 27 '19 at 03:18
  • The [other answer](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/27391/37939) also cites a figure for doctors under Age 35. That'd be a cool stat to get updated figures for, too. Actually, I'd kinda like to see someone compile the figures by the year, though admittedly that might be a bit of work. – Nat Apr 27 '19 at 03:28
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    I am tempted to accept this as the correct answer ;) – Celeritas Jun 18 '19 at 10:33