Women make up roughly 22% of active surgeons in the United States, though the exact figure varies by surgical specialty. That number has grown steadily over the past three decades, but surgery remains one of the most male-dominated corners of medicine. For context, women now represent 38.7% of all active physicians in the U.S., according to 2024 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
How the Numbers Vary by Specialty
The overall percentage obscures enormous differences between surgical fields. Obstetrics and gynecology, which involves significant surgical work, is 64.1% female. On the other end, orthopedic surgery is just 6.8% female, and sports medicine within orthopedic surgery sits at 7.8%. These are the lowest percentages of any medical specialty in the country.
General surgery, trauma surgery, and vascular surgery fall somewhere in the middle, with women making up roughly 20 to 25% of practitioners depending on the subspecialty. Neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery, and urologic surgery also skew heavily male, with women typically comprising fewer than 15% of active surgeons in those fields. The pattern is consistent: the more technically intensive and time-demanding the surgical specialty, the lower the percentage of women tends to be.
How These Numbers Have Changed Over Time
The growth has been real but slow. In England, where the Royal College of Surgeons tracks long-term data, only 3% of surgical consultants were women in 1991. By 2024, that figure had reached nearly 17%. The U.S. has followed a similar trajectory, with the share of female surgeons roughly doubling every 15 to 20 years since the 1980s.
A major driver of change is medical school enrollment. Women have made up about half of U.S. medical school classes since the early 2000s, and in recent years they’ve been the slight majority. But choosing medicine and choosing surgery are two different decisions. Women enter surgical residencies at lower rates than they enter other specialties, and they leave at higher rates once they’re in. The pipeline has widened at the top but still narrows considerably along the way.
Why Women Leave Surgery at Higher Rates
A study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons tracked physicians across U.S. academic medical centers and found an overall attrition rate of 34.2% after five years. For women, it was 38.3%, compared to 32.4% for men. After adjusting for other factors, female physicians were 25% more likely to leave academic medicine than their male counterparts. This held true across every career stage, every region, and in both surgical and nonsurgical specialties.
The reasons are layered. Surgical training is among the longest and most grueling in medicine, often spanning five to seven years of residency plus fellowship. That timeline collides directly with childbearing years, and many surgical programs have historically offered limited parental leave or schedule flexibility. Workplace culture plays a role too. Women in surgery report higher rates of harassment and discrimination than women in other medical fields, and the lack of female mentors and role models in senior positions compounds the problem.
Women in Surgical Leadership
The disparity grows sharper at the top. Only about 10.7% of surgery department chairs at U.S. medical schools are women, and just 12.9% of full professors in surgery are female. For comparison, women hold 24% of full professorships across all of medicine, up from 10% in 1979. Surgery lags well behind even that modest benchmark.
Residency program directors show slightly better representation, with women holding about 23.2% of those positions. But the leadership gap has a compounding effect. Departments led by male chairs were actually more likely to have female division directors (54.6%) than departments led by female chairs (29.4%), a counterintuitive finding that likely reflects small sample sizes and the uneven distribution of women across surgical subspecialties rather than any straightforward cause.
The Pay Gap in Surgery
Female academic surgeons earn 71 to 74 cents for every dollar their male colleagues make, and this gap persists at every academic rank. At the assistant professor level, the average salary difference is about $122,690 per year. At the associate professor level, it grows to $158,048. At the full professor level, it’s $152,550. These are not small differences.
The gap is widest in the highest-paying specialties. In neurosurgery, female professors earn roughly 69 cents on the dollar compared to male professors, and the disparity actually widens as women advance in rank. Orthopedic surgery shows a similarly large gap. Research covering 2014 to 2024 found no meaningful narrowing of these differences over that decade, suggesting that the pay gap in academic surgery is persistent rather than shrinking.
How the U.S. Compares Globally
The gender breakdown in surgery is not unique to the United States. In England, women make up approximately 17% of practicing surgeons, a figure that closely mirrors the U.S. when obstetrics and gynecology is excluded. Both countries have seen steady growth from very low baselines in the 1990s, but neither has reached anything close to parity.
The global pattern suggests that the barriers women face in surgery are structural and cultural rather than specific to any one country’s healthcare system. Long training pipelines, demanding schedules, entrenched workplace cultures, and the compounding effects of fewer women in leadership all create friction at every stage of a surgical career. The numbers are moving in the right direction, but at the current pace, gender parity in most surgical specialties is still decades away.