The female medical workforce

Abstract

As a female consultant anaesthetist, I fully support the remarks from Critchley et-al. in their article regarding females in leadership and the attribution of undesirable comments when women take authority, using agenic traits that would not be attributed to our male colleagues taking a similar stance.My comments, however, are about the proportion of female undergraduate medical students quoted, and subsequently working as consultants. While agreeing there are certainly fewer female consultants than males in the UK, there are a number of additional factors to take into account. In the article, proportions are used rather than absolute numbers. It is cited that while approximately 55% of medical students in the UK in the last decade have been female, at consultant level only 36.6% of doctors are female . In addition, the article states that, in the UK, female anaesthetic specialty trainees have increased from 28% in 2003 to 50.9% in 2019, but at consultant level only 32% of the workforce are female .