Steinem Charts New Course in Medicine

When Neil Baum entered medical school in the 1960s, the profession was overwhelmingly male. Women were present in classrooms and hospitals, but they were a small minority compared to men in faculty offices and leadership roles. The culture of medicine mirrored society at the time, with men expected to be doctors and professors while women were often relegated to nursing or teaching.

Baum recalls an anatomy lecture where a professor used slides of nude women not for serious educational purposes, but as a demeaning attempt to capture the attention of a nearly all-male class. That behavior seemed normal to the students then, but looking back more than six decades later, the episode seems almost unimaginable. It serves as a reminder of how much American society has changed.

From spectators to participants

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) attributes the dramatic transformation of the medical workforce to legal, social, and political forces, including the women’s movement and the emergence of leaders like Gloria Steinem. These four women advocated that “Women belong in medicine, women are intellectually capable of practicing medicine on equal terms with men, and women should have the same opportunities, choices, and power as men throughout society.” The change was not caused by Steinem alone.

Title IX, affirmative action policies, and changing admission practices were enormously important, but Steinem became one of the movement’s most visible voices. She challenged the fundamental assumption that a woman’s opportunities should be determined by her gender. That message mattered enormously to women considering careers in medicine.

Steinem’s most important connection to health care was her advocacy for reproductive freedom. In 1969, she spoke publicly for the first time at an abortion-rights meeting in New York and disclosed that she had undergone an abortion at age 22. She had previously kept the experience private because of the stigma surrounding abortion at the time. This event became a turning point in her life and activism. Steinem understood something that medicine sometimes failed to recognize: health care is not simply about treating disease. It is also about autonomy, dignity, and the ability to make decisions about one’s own body.

Ms. magazine changed the conversation

In 1972, Steinem and her colleagues launched Ms. magazine. It was revolutionary because it treated women not simply as wives, mothers, or consumers, but as people with political, professional, intellectual, and health concerns of their own. The magazine addressed subjects that mainstream publications avoided, including abortion, sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, and discrimination. A young woman reading Ms. could see women demanding careers, leadership, equal pay, reproductive freedom, and a voice in decisions affecting their lives. The message was simple but powerful: Women belong in this profession. That message eventually reached the medical school classroom, the operating room, the research laboratory, and the hospital boardroom.

Medical schools began confronting discriminatory admission practices. Title IX, enacted in 1972, prohibited sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. The AAMC notes that the 1970s saw a striking increase in women entering medicine, driven by these legal and social forces. Yale established what became the first Office for Women in Medicine in 1975, and the AAMC launched its Women in Medicine program in 1976. Women now constitute more than half of U.S. medical students. In 2023-24, women represented 54.6 percent of medical students.

Medicine followed society

In many specialties, the transformation is even more dramatic. By 2022, women represented 62 percent of physicians in obstetrics and gynecology, 66 percent in pediatrics, and 53 percent in dermatology. Baum trained in a surgical specialty where there were almost no women in the subspecialties when he was in medical school. In 2004, only 11 percent of general surgeons were women. By 2022, that had increased to 24 percent, doubling in less than two decades. In the 2024-25 surgery residency class, women accounted for 42.6 percent of general surgery residents. Today, the U.S. has 1,032,365 active physicians, and 38.7 percent are women, or nearly 400,000 female physicians.

Steinem did not change medicine by writing prescriptions or performing surgery. She changed something more fundamental: she helped change the expectations of society and, consequently, the expectations women had for themselves. She helped make it acceptable for a woman to say, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a surgeon, or I want to chair a department.

Women have made extraordinary gains in medicine, but leadership, compensation, academic advancement, and representation in some specialties continue to present challenges. A 1979 JAMA study, for example, found that although the number of women physicians was growing, women remained dramatically underrepresented in senior academic positions. Today’s medical profession still has work to do in recognizing unconscious bias, supporting women in leadership, addressing pregnancy and childcare barriers, and ensuring that women’s health receives the research and clinical attention it deserves. The profession has achieved a majority of female medical students, yet the institutional structures supporting those students remain largely unchanged.