Even twenty years after a major US study drew attention to a gender gap in medicine, the figure has hardly changed. Strikingly similar, a pattern in India is shrinking its female doctor pool precisely when it requires these women most at specialities and management levels in their healthcare services.
When, in 2004, the physician-scientist Jennifer Grandis surveyed 502 women otolaryngologists across the US about their careers, she was “surprised they made nearly 20% less than equally experienced male doctors, and more likely to cite harassment, divorce, and regret of specialty career than their male counterparts.” Revisiting the same questions twenty years later, she found ‘virtually nothing had changed.’ The insights of her recently published book, Harsh Medicine, are based on in-depth interviews with 52 men and 52 women drawn from 16 US institutions to tell this story of “how women enter academia and contribute effectively equal to men and then, as Grandis claims, get ‘actively flushed out of the pipeline.”
Here in India’s hospital corridors, thousands of kilometres away, this same leak is appearing in different numbers, but with unmistakable familiarity.
A global pattern
Grandis’s information illustrates a worldwide tendency that the World Health Organization’s Global Health Workforce Network also recorded: Women make up nearly 70% of all caregivers, nurses, physicians, and other professional care occupations throughout the globe, yet represent approximately only 25% of middle managers in organizations and about 5% of executive positions. In addition to pay disparities, Grandis found through subsequent research that the barriers for women were higher on virtually every step, from getting tenured or promoted to having professional contacts, even though mentorship roles that should be a career sling but end up being instances of harassment instead. Her finding, Grandis described, “is the kind of fatigue that can be misinterpreted as lacking motivation. What we’re seeing more often is that women don’t just drop out; they slow down.” and then they drop out more quietly.
India’s take on a leak
In 2026, a study by consulting firm Boston Consulting Group and non-profit Dasra outlines a disturbingly similar map across India. Half of India’s doctors complete their basic medical training with the majority female MB BB graduates, but Nearly 30 percent abandon the Profession somewhere between completing medical school and starting with Post grad Training and /Or Independent work; that is, thrice and multiple of the 5-10% dropout rate seen amongst men, Roshni Rathi BCG Partner stated “continuity rate for women doctors was between 65 to 75 per cent compared to between 90-95 per cent for their male colleagues-well over 100,000 trained female doctors are missing effectively out of practice or specialization. It continues to be that way higher”.
Such ‘loss’ is amplified the nearer one gets to the top, in high specialisation like cardiology, neurology, orthopaedics, Gastroenterology, Oncology, those collectively account for up to 70 percent of hospital revenue, female doctors are seen much less than 10 percent, this report also discovered.
For example, men dominate India’s nearly 2000 urologist members, with only 1 percent being women. As much as 70-85 percent of India’s nurses are women, but just 15-20% move into senior leadership and other highly paying positions; instead, they take up better prospects overseas than pursue vertical mobility. Neera Nundy, co-founder of Dasra, states the issue is systemic rather than anything like a failure of ambition. “They (female doctors) might be facing an enormous struggle between marriage and kids, family and job’, says Nundy,” The issue’ is the incompatibility of training in terms of timeline, time commitment, flexibility versus women’s life stages.
How is this leak a public health concern?
The impact extends past the individual careers of these doctors. The same 18-state study also indicated that when primary health centres had female doctors, they were more likely “to have increased utilisation of contraception, antenatal visits, and skilled birth attendant visits”. The women for whom a female doctor would most help is, necessarily, the ones most failed when she is not present – a phrasing that casts attrition less as a problem for the workforce and more as one for social justice.
Different fixes, different distances travelled
In the past decade or two, some countries have introduced institutional solutions. For example, the United Kingdom introduced an Athena SWAN charter in 2005 which linked financial support for institutions and recognition of grants at those universities/hospitals with time-bound, audited action plans on the recruitment, promotion, retention of women in scientific & medical positions; in Australia, the US and Canada, similar initiatives have been taken up to address a problem which has inspired at least one high level academic inquiry. India’s attempts on this matter, at present, have a piecemeal approach. However, some hospital chains like Max Healthcare and Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital had commenced their leadership programs in collaboration with institutes like the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, XLRI, where they had reported more than 50% representation of women in their batches, though there may still be some distance to go before this has become systematic.
Clear Cut Health Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: July 25, 2026 3:30 IST
Written By: Yatharth Pathak
