Talent, Trust, and Health: The Effects of the First Female Physicians

Join us for a research discussion featuring the work of Tamri Matiashvili (PhD candidate, Stanford Department of Economics) with prepared comments from Jana Hunter (Assistant Professor, Stanford Department of History). This event is co-sponsored by the Gender History Workshop and The Europe Center.

About the Event

How did the entry of women into historically male high-skill occupations shape the productivity and organization of those professions? This paper examines the first large-scale entry of female doctors into the medical profession following the Russian Empire’s 1872 decision to open the world’s first full-length medical school for women. 

Leveraging novel annual data on physician employment and vital statistics in over 300 districts from 1876–1910, augmented with more limited data on direct healthcare provision metrics, Matiashvili studies the hiring of the first female physicians across the rural public healthcare system. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design based on quasi-random timing of replacement hires, Matiashvili argues that female physician entry led to large and persistent declines in infant mortality, reductions in young adult mortality of both sexes, as well as increases in population growth. The first female physicians improved hospital care and drew more female patients into formal medical care, evidenced by their displacement of untrained midwives. Matiashvili further finds that female physicians fleeing the Russian Revolution and practicing in rural U.S. counties also reduced infant mortality. In her work, she develops a conceptual framework to disentangle positive selection and demand-side concordance preference mechanisms, and show that observed effects came from both the female physicians' greater overall effectiveness compared to the male doctors and from increased care-seeking among women. Matiashvili validates the framework’s long-run predictions using modern data on physician specialization and patient reviews.