Women in med school

Michelle has thrown out an interesting point for me to comment on that I had discussed with my med school friends quite early in the semester. My med school class is bigger overall than years before and more than 50% of the class is female. The larger # of women is I think due to the fact that there are a larger number of women than men applying and more get in - but there's not that much of an imbalance in our class. I think that because women have babies and are subsequently more apt to reduce their working hours to part-time thereafter for lifestyle reasons, increasing the class size substantially does not translate into that many more full-time equivalent people than perhaps if it were all men. Therefore I guess you’d need maybe 150 women to get 100 women’s worth of work after we’ve finished graduating and are practicing for a few years. I don’t think that (most) people are saying that there should be fewer women in med school but I guess it’s hard to argue the point about full-time equivalents. However, I would expect that men are making more lifestyle choices too to not work 100 hrs/week.