Why Era is Sponsoring the Women in Medicine Summit

Era Locums is a sponsor of this year's Women in Medicine Summit, and we are attending as a women-founded, women-owned company in an industry that mostly isn't. Before we head to the summit, we wanted to lay out why the conversation about women in medicine matters to us and why we think it should matter to the physicians we work with.

The short version is that the numbers on women in medicine have shifted dramatically over the last twenty years, but most of the structures physicians actually work inside have not kept up. That gap shows up in specialty distribution, pay, leadership, burnout, and eventually in who stays in full-time clinical practice and who does not. It is worth looking at each of those honestly.

The pipeline is already majority women

For the seventh year in a row, women make up the majority of U.S. medical school applicants, matriculants, and enrolled students. In the 2025–26 academic year, women accounted for 57.2% of applicants and 55% of matriculants, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. In 2024–25, women became the majority of residents and fellows for the first time, at 50.2% of the total, per the AAMC 2025 Report on Residents.

The active practicing workforce is moving quickly, if not as quickly as the pipeline. As of early 2025, women made up 38.7% of active U.S. physicians — roughly 424,000 out of 1.1 million doctors — per the AAMC U.S. Physician Workforce Data Dashboard. That is up from 26% in 2004. Within a decade, women will likely be the majority of practicing physicians in the United States.

Where women in medicine concentrate, and where they don't

Women are not distributed evenly across specialties, and the concentration pattern matters because it correlates with pay, call structure, and leadership access.

Per the AAMC 2025 workforce data, the specialties with the highest share of women include pediatrics at 66.7%, obstetrics and gynecology at 64.1%, and hospice and palliative medicine at 63.1%. On the other end, orthopedic surgery is 6.8% women, sports medicine within orthopedic surgery is 7.8%, and general surgery sits at roughly 22%. OBGYN has shifted from 38% women in 2004 to 64% today, one of the fastest specialty transformations on record.

The specialties women disproportionately enter tend to carry lower reimbursement, higher patient-facing hours, and heavier call and after-hours documentation loads. That is one factor in the pay gap, though it is not the only factor.

The pay gap widened again

Doximity's 2025 Physician Compensation Report, which analyzed data from more than 37,000 physicians, found the gender pay gap in medicine returned to 26% in 2024, up from 23% in 2023. Even after adjusting for specialty, location, and years of experience, women physicians earned an average of $120,917 less than male physicians. Compensation for men rose 5.7% that year while compensation for women rose only 1.7%, reversing several years of narrowing (Doximity).

The most recent Medscape data lines up with the same trend. Male physicians averaged $429,000 in 2025 compared with $327,000 for female physicians — a $102,000 gap (Becker's Hospital Review). And among millennial physicians specifically, the gap grew 29% in a single year, from $79,000 in 2024 to $102,000 in 2025 (Becker's Physician Leadership).

Marit Health's 2026 analysis of over 14,000 anonymous full-time physician salary submissions estimated a lifetime earnings difference of roughly $3.3 million over a 30-year career for women physicians compared to their male peers (Marit Health).

The most important caveat is that the pay gap for women in medicine is not fully explained by specialty choice. It persists inside pediatrics, inside OBGYN, and inside internal medicine.

Leadership hasn't followed the pipeline

Even in specialties where women are already the clinical majority, they do not lead them. In OBGYN, where women are 64% of the physician workforce, they hold only 38% of department chair positions, based on research published in the Journal of Healthcare Leadership.

Across academic medicine as a whole, per the AAMC State of Women in Academic Medicine 2023–2024 report, women hold 45% of full-time medical school faculty positions, 27% of medical school dean positions, and 25% of department chair positions. The training pipeline for women in medicine flipped seven years ago. The leadership pipeline has not.

Burnout is where the mismatch becomes visible

Given the pay gap, the specialty concentration, the leadership ceiling, and the caregiving reality, the burnout numbers for women physicians follow logically.

The AMA's most recent survey, released in April 2026, found 46% of women physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout, compared with 37% of men — a nine-point gap that has held roughly steady for years, even as overall burnout has declined (AMA). Medscape's 2026 report, which uses a broader definition, puts the gap wider at 53% for women versus 39% for men (Medscape).

The Stanford Medicine-led national study found that women physicians face a burnout risk roughly 27% higher than men, even after adjusting for age, specialty, and hours worked (Stanford Medicine). Two structural drivers show up repeatedly in the research: women physicians spend between 40% and 217% more time on the EHR after clinic hours than their male counterparts, according to research summarized by Tebra, and women physicians working full-time carry an average of 8.5 more hours per week of childcare and domestic labor than their partners (American Medical Women's Association). Documentation load and the second shift are both structural, and neither responds to individual wellness programs.

The response is showing up in the exit data

The most striking recent numbers are about who is leaving clinical practice, and when.

A national longitudinal analysis published this year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that women physicians are 43% more likely to leave clinical practice than men, at every age and across specialties. Among physicians who do leave, the median age for women is 49. The median for men is 64. That is a fifteen-year gap in career length.

A separate national survey summarized by Today's Hospitalist found that women physicians were significantly more likely than men to cite caring for young children (21.3% vs. 4.2%), caring for other family members (7.9% vs. 0.6%), and stress (31.7% vs. 12.9%) as reasons for leaving practice.

The 2026 Doximity physician survey found that 74% of women physicians have considered a career change, compared with 62% of men, driven largely by overwork and compensation (STAT News). And Doximity's Op-Med analysis showed early-retirement intent among women physicians rose from 33% in 2023 to 54% in 2026 (Doximity Op-Med).

The women who make up the majority of the pipeline are already stepping back from full-time clinical practice in significant numbers. That is a workforce signal health systems have been slow to reckon with.

What locum tenens changes

Locum tenens is one of several structural changes physicians can make to how they hold clinical work. It is not the whole answer, and we do not want to overclaim.

What it does change is the labor arrangement. A locum physician is a 1099 independent contractor. She runs a business. She chooses when she works and when she does not. She decides how many clinical hours she sells. She contracts for a defined period, and if the assignment is not working, the contract ends without political cost. Her pay is set on the contract rather than negotiated inside internal comp bands that research consistently shows disadvantage women.

The business-owner status also carries financial upside that W-2 physicians simply do not have. As a 1099 contractor, she can deduct business expenses, contribute to retirement vehicles like a SEP-IRA or solo 401(k) with significantly higher limits than a typical employer plan, structure her practice through an LLC or S-corp, and treat continuing education, licensing, and professional expenses as part of a tax strategy she controls. We covered the specifics in 1099 Physician Tax Deductions You Should Take in 2026. Over a career, these differences compound meaningfully.

For a woman physician early in her career, that can mean auditioning three or four practice environments before committing to one and building financial infrastructure that a young W-2 physician usually cannot. For a physician in her caregiving years, it can mean compressing clinical work into concentrated blocks and preserving real non-clinical time without the career penalty of formal part-time status. For a late-career physician who is not ready to retire but is ready to stop absorbing the administrative load of permanent employment, it can mean staying clinically engaged on her own terms.

What locum tenens does not do is close the pay gap across medicine, put more women in department chair roles, or shorten the second shift at home. Those live inside health systems and academic institutions. What it does do is give a physician the authority to decide how work-life integration works for her, to negotiate pay and hours from a stronger position, and to make the tradeoffs that make sense for her life rather than for an employer's staffing model.

Why we're at the Summit

Era Locums is women-founded and women-owned in a locum tenens industry that is heavily consolidated under private equity and largely led by men. This is our first year sponsoring the Women in Medicine Summit, and we are attending because we want to be part of the conversation as female professionals in a field that has historically not had many of us at the table.

We're going to listen, to learn from the physicians in the room, and to be an ally to women in medicine wherever we can be. If you are attending, we would like to meet you.