Shut down and shut out: women physicians in the era of medical education reform

In 1900, women constituted more than 10 percent of practicing physicians in some cities, but the share of American physicians who were female declined in the early twentieth century. This decline is often linked to the professionalization of medical practice and associated changes in medical education that led to a wave of medical school closures. Using a newly constructed panel dataset of medical colleges, we show that women’s access to medical education was blocked by the closure of schools with traditionally high female enrollments. While we find evidence that male enrollment dropped when schools added requirements for pre-medical school college coursework, we do not find similar effects for women. The findings suggest that women were held to higher standards for admission than were men prior to the educational reforms.