PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

Specialty selection: Men, too, seek work-life balance

Despite perceptions, it's not just women in medicine who are concerned about controllable lifestyles.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews staff. Oct. 3, 2005.

With two children younger than 4 and his wife about to have their third child, emergency physician John Oester, MD, readily admits that time with his family was a factor when choosing his field of medicine.

"Definitely being able to control my life more entered into my thought process," said Dr. Oester, who practices in Augusta, Ga.

That thought process is typical of Dr. Oester's generation. Choosing a medical discipline with controllable hours was once considered a career trend confined to women, who now make up nearly half of new, U.S.-trained physicians. But new research shows that the trend is a generation-wide shift in attitude toward work, not a gender issue.

"The people going into medicine now ... don't see themselves solely as physicians," said E. Ray Dorsey, MD, lead author of "The Influence of Controllable Lifestyle and Sex on the Specialty Choices of Graduating U.S. Medical Students, 1996-2003," one of two studies looking at the topic in Academic Medicine's September issue.

The data show that although there is a belief that women are searching for a work-life balance, men, too, are pursuing this avenue. Dr. Dorsey found that the percentage of women choosing specialties with controllable lifestyles was 36% in 2003, but 45% of men made the same choice that year.

And there's been an uptick in interest in those careers among both genders. Between 1996 and 2003, the number of women pursuing controllable lifestyle careers such as anesthesiology, emergency medicine, ophthalmology, psychiatry and radiology increased by 18 percentage points. The number of men picking fields such as those increased by 17 percentage points during the same time period.

[...]

Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.

Access details

Join the AMA