Health

A first: More women apply to medical school than men

BOSTON - For the first time ever, women outnumbered men among people applying to U.S. medical schools for this fall - a milestone in the slow but steady increase in the number of aspiring female doctors.

Nearly 35,000 men and women applied for the 2003-04 school year, a 3.4 percent increase over last year and the first increase since 1996. More than 17,600 of the applicants - or 50.8 percent - were women, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Women have yet to surpass the number of men actually entering medical school. Nationwide this fall, women were closer than ever to making up the majority of new students, constituting 49.7 percent of the entering class of more than 16,500.

AAMC's president, Dr. Jordan Cohen, recalled that in his 1960 Harvard class of 150 students, there were six women. That was, he said, "a banner year" for the time.

Dr. Robert Witzburg, director of admissions at Boston University School of Medicine, said medical schools reflect changing social norms. His school opened as the nation's first all-women medical school in 1848 and began admitting men in 1872.

"The father of two daughters in me says that (women are) doing that because they're being given the chance, and because they're qualified and capable," he said.

The proportion of female applicants to men has risen steadily for years. For the 1993-94 entering class, women made up 41.9 percent of the more than 42,800 applicants, up from 34 percent of the more than 35,100 applicants a decade earlier. In 1963, they were 8.1 percent of the almost 17,700 applicants.

Yen Truong, 23, of San Francisco is a first-year student at Tufts University School of Medicine - where 52 percent of the 8,200 applicants for next year's class were women.

Truong is pursuing joint medical and public health degrees because, she said, she loves both science and community service.

"Medicine has come to accept that it's not just science, it's more of an occupation of caring," she said. "I think that's a positive change, in that women are better served that way, and patients are better served if there are more women doctors."

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