Gender has proven to be a factor related to which physician specialties residents pursue following their graduation from medical school.
Data for 2024–2025—gathered by the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges as part of their annual National Graduate Medical Education (GME) Census and published in JAMA®—offers some insight on which medical, surgical and other specialties are most popular among male and female physicians entering residency.
Gender balance is one of the factors that students may consider when choosing a specialty. FREIDA™ is an AMA tool that offers searchable, sortable data on 13,000-plus residency and fellowship programs accredited by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education, and it can help you gather the information you need to find the right match.
Additional AMA resources to aid you with your medical specialty choice include the FREIDA Specialty Guide and the AMA “Shadow Me” Specialty Series, which speaks to real physicians for specialty-specific insight.
Women-dominated physician specialties
On the whole, when adding in specialties, subspecialties and combined specialties, women accounted for exactly 50% of active GME trainees in the U.S. Of the nearly 33,000 internal medicine residents, 46.3% were women, and 55.9% of the nation’s 15,000-plus family medicine trainees were women.
Residency specialty trends among women remained relatively consistent with prior-year data. Among specialties and subspecialties with at least 100 active residents, these 10 were the most dominated by women:
- Obstetrics and gynecology—88.6%.
- Developmental-behavioral pediatrics—87%.
- Urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery—82.2%.
- Pediatric hospital medicine—82.2%.
- Gynecologic oncology—80.4%.
- Reproductive endocrinology and infertility—80.8%.
- Maternal-fetal medicine—79.8%.
- Pediatrics—75.4%.
- Pediatrics/psychiatry/child and adolescent psychiatry (combined specialty)—74.6%.
- Endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism—69.6%.
Learn more about the AMA Women Physicians Section, which seeks to influence and contribute to AMA policy and program development on issues of importance to women physicians, and to increase the number and influence of women physicians in leadership roles.
Male-dominated physician specialties
The study’s authors did not report which physician specialties had the most men. Instead, they reported which specialties had the fewest women—figures which still shed light on specialty trends in residency and fellowship by gender.
Of those with 100 or more trainees in 2024–2025, the 10 physician specialties and subspecialties with the lowest shares of women trainees were:
- Orthopaedic sports medicine—12.9%.
- Clinical cardiac electrophysiology—14.4%.
- Interventional cardiology—19.2%.
- Interventional radiology—22%.
- Pain medicine—23%.
- Orthopaedic surgery—23.7%.
- Neurological surgery—27.2%.
- Radiology-diagnostic—29.2%.
- Cardiovascular disease—30.4%.
- Critical care medicine—33.5%.
Specialties with most gender balance
Specialties that featured a near equal mix of men and women among the population of residents included neurology (50.7% women), general surgery (50.8% women) and psychiatry (53.5%).
Consult the AMA Road to Residency Guide to successfully plan your path to residency, from researching programs and excelling at interviews to navigating Match Day and more.
