Last updated on March 15, 2019
Did any of you other physician working moms out there get the dreaded made-at-school mother’s day card this year?
You know, the one your kid makes in class, where they trace a flower (or some variation), and on each petal writes a word to describe you, their cherished mother?
Why does the sight of this card fill the heart of the physician working mom with dread? Because, if your kids are like mine, they inevitably write something that brings on the deluge of working mom guilt. In past years, the knife-in-heart winner on my cards has been “always working” (or some variation).
This year was no exception.
“Gone.”
This was the word in the very center of the card.
“Work.”
This was off to the side.
“Home.”
Well okay, this is something, at least my child can acknowledge I am sometimes at home. But this one was off to the side too.
There were various other words and many were sweet and nice, but it didn’t matter because my eyes kept returning to that one word, “gone,” right in the center — knife-in-the heart again.
Each year I wonder what the teachers must think of me.
Are my children the only ones that write these kind of things on the mother’s day card? I know lots of non-physician working moms, yet I never seem to hear them relate the same kind of stories. Is it because they manage to at least get home in time for dinner each night?
I was curious as to how many physician working moms there are in the U.S.
How many of us are there? It was harder than one might think to find this data. After trying several variations on google search terms for physician working moms, I finally found, buried several pages in, a link to an AMA insurance survey done in 2015.
According to this survey, 43% of female physicians in current practice in the U.S. are working mothers with children at home under age 18.
So how many total numbers of physician working moms does that translate to? To calculate that, let’s start with the total number of all physicians in current practice in the U.S., which according to a 2016 survey, is equal to 953,695 licensed allopathic and osteopathic physicians in current practice in the U.S.
Next we need to know how many of the total are female. According to the census, that was 33.5% in 2016 (up from 29.7% in 2010),
for a total of 319,488 active licensed female physicians in the U.S.
If we apply the statistic from the AMA insurance survey, that 43% of these female physicians are working mothers with children at home under age 18, that gives us a total of …
137,380 working female physicians in the U.S. who are mothers with children at home under the age of 18.
Somehow, that number doesn’t seem as high as I was expecting it would be.
It is only 14.4% of all physicians in current practice in the U.S.
But, I hope, it will continue to grow, as in 2017, medical school enrollments for the first time enrolled more women than men, at 50.7%.
For some positive perspective on working mom guilt, read this post.
A few other resources out there are Mothers in Medicine and MomMD.
KevinMD also has a large number of physician blog contributors. I found relevant posts by either searching “mother” or “work life balance” in the search field on the main page.
Do you know of any more resources for physician working moms? Or do you have a great mother’s day card story? Let us know by commenting!