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Obviously no one can know the future with certainty. But several articles make statements regarding more women graduating with medical degrees than men and that in the near future more doctors will be women rather than men.

From here

For many years now, Canada’s population of female doctors has been growing at a far greater rate than its male doctors.

However they don't cite any sources.

From here

New research asks if medicine is fast becoming a woman’s domain. In the UK, female doctors are set to outnumber their male counterparts by 2017,

Though this isn't Canada.

From here

And because the proportion of family practitioners who are male continues to decline — about 60 per cent of new medical students are female — we can look forward to the problem of accessing care getting worse.

This doesn't have references.

Are there any reliable sources that have statistics regarding the amount of medical students who intend to work in Canada, and compare the ratios of males to females or something like that? If the topic is too broad I'm most curious about GPs.

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  • Because of immigration, the population of doctors might not be caused only by the number of students.
    – ChrisW
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 22:25

2 Answers 2

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According to the Canadian Medical Association's statistics (which counts all doctors in Canada, not just CMA members), as of January 2015, there are more male doctors than there are female doctors.

Out of the 78,657 doctors in Canada, 30,814 are female, 47,766 are male, and 77 are unknown.

Looking at only doctors under 35, women significantly outnumber men 3,693 to 2,387, and of of the 2,804 new MDs in 2014, 1,584 were women. Additionally, the majority of new doctors have been women since 2001. As such, it does look like female doctors will eventually outnumber male doctors if the current trend continues.

Looking at specialties, women currently make up a majority of some specialties, such as Geriatric Medicine and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, whereas men make up a majority of almost all surgical specialisties and also form the majority of Family Medicine practitioners.

Though CMA's statistics don't seem to include an age/sex/specialty breakdown to verify the 3rd statement as to whether the percentage of female family medicine specialists is growing.

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  • The wording "a majority of them have been women since 2001" is a bit unclear. It seems to say that sex changing surgery is becoming so common that's not reasonable to assume that in a certain group the number of people born women is close to the number of (current) women.
    – Bakuriu
    Commented Apr 20, 2015 at 6:00
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    @Bakuriu - What I mean by that is that there have been more new female MDs than there have been new male MDs in every year since 2001. For example, in 2014, 56.5% of new MDs in Canada were female.
    – Compro01
    Commented Apr 20, 2015 at 6:24
  • Yes, but grammatically the them in that sentence refers to the women just mentioned, not to the doctors that are only mentioned at the beginning of the sentence. This is what I meant by unclear wording.
    – Bakuriu
    Commented Apr 20, 2015 at 13:03
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    Besides considering the gender ratio among doctors entering the field, one should also consider gender differences in the rate at which doctors leave the field.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Apr 28, 2019 at 1:26
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To update this with January 2018 data -- still untrue:

ALL PHYSICIANS  
Female:   35,372   42.0%
Male:     48,860   58.0%
Unknown:      28    0.0%
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  • Since the question is about what will happen in the future you haven't shown it to be untrue by quoting current statistics.
    – DJClayworth
    Commented Apr 24, 2019 at 17:21
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    The claim in 2015 was that it would happen "soon", so I'd like to think I have. Fortunately we can let the votes decide.
    – Roger
    Commented Apr 24, 2019 at 17:34
  • None of the claims that the question is based on give a timeframe. They point towards ongoing trends and what that suggests about the future. A single snapshot from a couple years later doesn't do anything to dispute those claims as "untrue", considering "soon" hasn't been clearly defined.
    – JMac
    Commented Apr 24, 2019 at 18:28
  • If anything this shows ~4500 more female and ~1100 more male doctors, which is consistent with the trends in the other answer; if anything, it shows a faster rate. I don't see what this answer adds.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Apr 24, 2019 at 20:28
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    I am tempted to accept this as the correct answer ;)
    – Celeritas
    Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 10:33

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