Sex Discrimination and Admission to Medical School, 1929-1984

Beginning in the early 1970s there was a dramatic increase in the proportion of women admitted to medical school. The previous low proportion of women entering medicine could have resulted from sex-role socialization that influenced women not to aspire to careers in medicine and/or from direct discrimination by medical schools. Utilizing historical data on both application and admissions to medical school, this paper tests the specific hypothesis that medical school admissions committees discriminated against women: from 1929 to the present time, women applicants to medical school had just as good a chance of being accepted as men applicants. Also, the qualifications of the men and women applicants were essentially equal. These findings suggest that as far back as 1929 the low representation of women in medicine was primarily a result of differences in socializtion-based occupational choice. The paper does not deal with the important question of whether women had experienced discrimination either before application to medical school or after admission to it.