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Invited Commentary
October 2015

Ensuring a Diverse Physician Workforce: Progress but More to Be Done

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
JAMA Intern Med. 2015;175(10):1708-1709. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.4333

In their study of the diversity of graduate medical education in the United States, Deville and colleagues1 call attention yet again to the continued underrepresentation of women and minority groups in medicine compared with the population as a whole. Among the many interesting findings, I was most struck that among all specialties, obstetrics and gynecology had the greatest proportion of women trainees in 2012 (82.4%), the highest percentage of black trainees (10.3%), and one of the highest percentages of Hispanic trainees (8.7%). All these percentages reflect substantial increases over the past 3 decades. The proportion of practicing female obstetrician-gynecologists has steadily increased from around 20% in the early 1990s to nearly half by 2010.

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