Published
2024-10-03
Issue
Section
Original Reports
License
Copyright (c) 2024 William J. Crump, Summer Sparks, Lindsay Tucker, Cierra Woodcock, Craig Ziegler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
All work in JRMC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Gender Differences in Planned Retirement Age Among Medical Students: Are Changes on the Horizon?
William J. Crump
Univeristy of Louisville School of Medicine Trover Campus at Baptist Health Madisonville
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7942-4757
Summer Sparks
Lindsay N. Tucker
Cierra P. Woodcock
Craig Ziegler
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7984-8607
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/jrmc.v7i3.5784
Keywords: gender differences, age of retirement, professional identity formation
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Gender Differences in Planned Retirement Age Among Medical Students: Are Changes On the Horizon?
Purpose
Planned age of retirement has an important effect on the physician workforce. Earlier studies of practicing physicians have reported that the planned as well as actual retirement age was significantly younger for women. Also, previous reports had shown that rural physicians tended to retire earlier. This paper offers a view earlier in the physician pipeline and reports surveys of medical students and pre-medical college students concerning their retirement plans.
Methods
During 2015-2019, 70 college students and 41 medical students at a regional rural medical campus completed a career eulogy that included their planned retirement age.
Results
Combining both groups of students, women planned to retire at a mean age of 61.9 and men at 59.1, P=0.048. A longitudinal comparison of just medical students showed that prematriculation students just before starting medical school had the oldest planned age of 66.9, compared to college students (57.4 to 58.9) and medical students (64.0 to 64.6), P=0.049. There was no difference in planned retirement age in rural vs urban upbringing.
Conclusions
In this group of pathways students, women planned to retire almost 3 years later than men, which differs from earlier reports of physicians in practice. The men planned retirement almost 5 years earlier than in previous reports of planned retirement age. There was no difference in rural vs urban upbringing. Whether this is a generalizable finding will require similar studies in different student populations on other campuses, and our survey instrument is available for others to look deeper into the process of professional identity formation that may explain any differences in planned retirement age.
