Brown Bag Seminar: What to specialise in? The role of gender stereotypes in selecting a career for Czech and Slovak medical students

This paper investigates whether higher exposure to gender stereotypes increases medical students' preferences for specialties where either women or men physicians significantly prevail. It builds on unique data surveyed from around 3,000 Czech and Slovak medical students between 2020 and 2022. The data suggest that the higher the share of the population in the region that agrees with gender stereotypical statements, the higher the probability that women medical students with administrative residence there will prefer women-dominated specialties. Furthermore, a significantly higher proportion of women medical students report encounters with discriminatory behaviour during undergraduate training (42% of women vs. 27% of men). At the same time, they also report placing greater emphasis on the behaviour of practising physicians when contemplating their future specialisation. These results provide additional arguments for combating prevalent gender stereotypes and discriminatory behaviour at a time when the proportion of women physicians is increasing.