What My Son’s Week at Camp Told Me About the Future of Medicine

My 16-year-old, Charles, wants to be a doctor. This summer he did a one-week program called Outset, where high schoolers spend the week learning about the path to medicine. They have lectures on medicine as a career, small-group labs on blood draws and suturing, and simulation sessions on cardiac emergencies and how to run a code.

Like every camp these days, they posted pictures daily, tagging my kid alongside the other kids in the course. I opened the first batch and I was shocked, not because he was having a good time (he was) but because of the ratio of girls to boys in every single photo. I texted him to ask, and it turns out his cohort had 40 girls out of 45 total campers. I asked him why. He said, “I don’t know, it just seems like these are the kids who want to be doctors.”

We’ve been running FemInEM for ten years. For a decade, our mission has been advancing gender equity in medicine, ensuring young women know there’s a future for them in this field. Looking at those photos, I had a strange thought: maybe we’re not just there. Maybe we’re past it. Maybe there are many more young women who want to be doctors than young men. And if that’s true, why?

I had a call with the camp’s program director, who told me that across hundreds of students in cohorts nationwide, roughly 75% of their students are female. This holds true across ethnic, racial and socioeconomic groups. Those numbers support what I saw in the pictures. Maybe these aren’t the characteristics of just one program, but instead a trend that’s been building for years.

• Women now make up 57.3% of all undergraduates in the U.S..

• Women have outnumbered men in medical school for six years in a row. According to the AAMC, in the 2025–26 entering class, women were 57.2% of medical school applicants, 55.0% of matriculants, and 55.0% of total enrollment, the sixth consecutive year women have held the majority at every stage.

• However, only about 38.7% of active physicians are women.

• In emergency medicine specifically, women make up roughly 40% of the workforce but only about 28% of academic EM faculty.

• Research on the “leaky pipeline” shows women leave EM residency and the EM workforce at higher rates than men, and leave the workforce itself an average of 12 years earlier than their male colleagues.

So here’s the thing, the pipeline is disproportionately female, but the workforce, and especially the leadership of that workforce, still isn’t. Something is happening at both ends, and it’s worth asking - Is medicine becoming female dominant and what does that mean for the future?

A few weeks later I was talking to a professor of history and gender studies. She told me she’s worried, because history shows a pattern: the more a profession feminizes, the more its pay tends to erode. I responded that the economics of medicine (education debt, reimbursement, financial autonomy) was already going in the wrong direction, so I wasn’t sure that gender ratios were going to have that big of an impact. But it got me thinking, is this a chicken-or-egg problem? Are there more women in medicine because men are deterred by the fact that the lifestyle has gotten harder and the economics aren’t what they used to be? Or are the economics eroding because more women are in the field? I genuinely don’t know.

If we’re going to talk honestly about why more women are proportionally choosing medicine, we have to talk about debt and opportunity cost, because I think that math is doing more work in this conversation than we admit.

• The average medical school graduate now leaves with around $223,000 in total education debt (premed plus medical school), for the Class of 2025, up 5% from the year before.

  • An intern makes $65,000, with modest salary increases for 2-3 more years and (in EM) earns an average of $290,000 as a new attending.

• Compare that to the other careers available to an ambitious 22-year-old:

  • Invest three years in law school. A three-year degree compared to a four-year medical degree means less educational debt. A first-year BigLaw associate now starts around $225,000–$235,000 which completely eliminates the underpaid portion of residency training required in medicine.

  • No graduate degree: A first-year investment banking analyst starts around $100,000–$120,000 in base salary, with total comp often reaching $150,000–$240,000 in year one.

If you are expecting to be the primary breadwinner for your family, and that expectation still lands disproportionately on men, the math on medicine has gotten harder to justify next to law or finance. That doesn’t mean medicine doesn’t pay well. It does. But it’s a much longer, much more expensive road to get there, and I don’t think that’s lost on those doing the math.

At FemInEM we want as many people to become physicians as feel called to it, and we never wanted gender, or workplace policies related to gender, to be the barrier that kept anyone out. That hasn’t changed. But I think we’re looking down the road at a real possibility: that emergency medicine, and medicine more broadly, may be heading toward a workforce that is overwhelmingly female. Not because we pushed too hard, but because of some combination of who’s being called to this work, who can afford the years it takes to get there.