Adtalem’s institutions combined graduate more women with Doctor of Medicine degrees than the average U.S. medical school. It’s not even close.
It took until the 2020s for there to be a year with more female than male Doctor of Medicine graduates. Adtalem Global Education’s scale puts it ahead of U.S. medical schools in graduating women.
For the 2023-24 academic year, U.S. medical schools graduated 72 women on average, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Combined, Adtalem’s American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and Ross University School of Medicine graduated 419—more than five times as many as the average for U.S. medical schools. The U.S. medical school with the highest number of female MDs graduated 166.
Adtalem Graduates More Female Physicians
For the 2023-24 academic year, 72% of U.S. medical schools graduated more female than male MDs. Adtalem schools did as well, but at a much greater scale.
Why It Matters
The U.S. needs more physicians. If underserved populations had the same access to healthcare as those with fewer barriers, the U.S. would need between 117,100 and 202,800 additional physicians (as of 2021), according to a 2024 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Women physicians have strong outcomes. In April 2024, the Annals of Internal Medicine spurred a debate that’s still causing a stir with the publication of “Comparison of Hospital Mortality and Readmission Rates by Physician and Patient Sex.” Researchers looked at a sample of Medicare hospital patients over 30 days to see how many were readmitted or died and correlated it with the gender of their doctor.
The peer-reviewed article found that female physicians had better patient outcomes.
Education and Women Doctors in U.S. History
It’s been fewer than 200 years since the first woman was admitted to a U.S. medical school. (Male students thought it was a prank.) As an 1849 graduate, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell cofounded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
- In 1883, of 54,500 doctors in the U.S., fewer than 300 were women.
- By the mid-1960s, women were only 6% of U.S. medical school enrollment.
- A decade later in the ’70s, women were 16% of their med school graduating classes.
Graduation rates for women and men started to approach fifty-fifty in the early 2000s. Here’s what it looked like the last few years—including when women surpassed men as medical school graduates.
For more information, email the Adtalem Global Communications Team: adtalemmedia@adtalem.com.
