RESEARCH ARTICLE n a

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleIn the U.S. and in Europe, the number of women in medical schools started to increase in the 1970s [1,2]. The careers of these female physicians were expected to follow a linear development in all fields and levels of medicine. In the late 1990s, the time-lag phenomenon no longer could explain women’s lack of career advance-ment in male-dominated specialties such as surgery, and [2]. Today, when women constitute about half of med-ical students in several Western societies [3-6], statistics still show that women physicians are underrepresented in high-status specialties like surgery and clustered in specialties characterized by relatively low earnings or prestige [7-9]. Gender segregation in specialty preference has been found already in medical school [10-12] and previous studies have not been able to show any changes in this remarkably stable and almost universal pattern * Correspondence