Twice as many African-American women as men applied to medical school, and black women accounted for nearly two-thirds of black students who were accepted and eventually matriculated. That disparity translates into graduation rates, with 63% of new black MDs in 2011 being women.
By comparison, the non-Hispanic white gender gap in favor of men is 55%-45%, and while most other racial and ethnic groups skew female, they don’t come near the African-American gender gap. Overall, according to AAMC, the male-female gap in applicants and matriculants in 2011 was 53%-47% favoring men, a near-historic low ratio that has held steady for the past few years.
The AAMC report said the “persistent” problem of black male underrepresentation among medical school applicants speaks to a need for medical schools, which have stepped up minority recruitment efforts in recent years to try to get their student bodies to reflect the American population, “to institute plans and initiatives aimed at strengthening the pipeline.” Efforts include attempts to interest more black male youth in medicine and hiring more faculty members “from racially and ethnically underrepresented groups.”
“We have a major, major problem in this country,” said Marc Nivet, EdD, the AAMC’s chief diversity officer. “There is just simply an enormous amount of indisputable evidence that we’re not intervening as effectively as we’d like as a society to increase the talent pool of African-Americans who are capable of taking advantage of the science curricula available up and down the pipeline.”
Despite a 3% rise in the total number of male African-American medical school graduates during the last decade, the proportion of new doctors who were black men fell from 2.6% in 2002 to 2.4% in 2011. African-Americans account for 13% of the U.S. population, but only 6% of 2011 matriculants were black, as are just 4% of practicing doctors. And while the Census Bureau reports that 10% of U.S. men 30 and older are African-American, less than 3% of practicing doctors are black men, according to American Medical Association data.