Gender Differences in Career Choice Influences

This study examined whether a career influences survey assessing the value medical students place on providing comprehensive patient care exhibited measurement invariance across males and females. Findings supported measurement invariance and indicated that women valued opportunities to provide comprehensive care when choosing a career specialty more than men. The factors that lead medical students to choose a particular career specialty are complex and poorly understood (Newton, Grayson, & Thompson, 2005). In the past fifteen years, the percentage of medical students choosing primary care careers (e.g. family practice, general internal medicine) has declined sharply, while the percentage of students entering careers such as plastic surgery and emergency medicine has increased dramatically (Newton et al., 2005). Psychiatry and anesthesiology, on the other hand, have fluctuated from year to yea