What Does “Normal” Look Like for Women Physicians? (Spoiler: It’s Not Great.)
I love physician data. Physician data is one of the few ways we can name what we all feel, even though we tell ourselves what we experience is “just part of the job.”
The fatigue.
The cognitive fog.
The irritability that feels like it’s coming from your bones.
The sense that Outlook is slowly replacing your personality.
And also the quieter, more unsettling question underneath all of it: Is this sustainable?
Not “can I finish this week?”
Not “can I push through this rotation?”
Not “can I just make it to spring break?”
But: Can I do this for decades without it costing me something irreversible?
Recently, I came across an article from Harvard Medicine Magazine that made me stop scrolling mid-sip of coffee. It summarized a 2025 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that examined mortality rates among US physicians and other healthcare workers from 2020–2022.
And the results were complicated.
The Good News: Physicians Don’t Die as Early as Everyone Else
Let’s start with what seems reassuring.
The study found that physicians overall have lower age-adjusted and sex-adjusted mortality rates than non–healthcare workers, even compared to other high-income professions.
In the dataset (adults ages 25–74), the annual mortality rate per 100,000 people was:
Physicians: 269.3 deaths per 100,000
High-income non–healthcare workers: 499.2 per 100,000
All workers overall: 730.6 per 100,000
So yes. On paper, being a physician seems protective.
Which makes sense. We have medical knowledge. We tend to have stable income. We know what hypertension is, and we keep track of our LDL. (You are keeping track of your LDL, right?)
And yet.
That’s the headline, not the truth.
The Actual Story: The “Female Advantage” Disappears in Medicine
In the general population, women have lower mortality than men, and it’s a well-established demographic pattern. In this study, women in non-healthcare occupations had much lower mortality than men (female-to-male ratio 0.55). High-income women also had a mortality advantage (0.60).
But women physicians? Female physicians are dying at nearly the same rate as male physicians.
In a profession where women are often expected to be “the healthier ones,” “the more balanced ones,” “the ones who manage everything better,” the actual mortality advantage is basically gone.
If you’ve ever thought, “Maybe I’m just not handling this as well as other people,” I would like to offer you a new thought:
Maybe the job is doing something to us.
This is something about the experience of being a woman physician.
And before we even get to the obvious culprits (sleep deprivation, chronic stress, shift work, delayed preventive care, workplace exposures, the cortisol-rich joy of inbox messages that begin with “Quick question…”), I want to name the most insidious factor:
We normalize the abnormal.
We’ve Been Calling This “Normal” for So Long We Forgot It Was a Red Flag
We tell ourselves things like:
“Everyone is tired.”
“This is just what being a doctor is like.”
“It’s a hard season.”
“Once the kids are older…”
“Once I get promoted…”
“Once I’m done with this committee…”
But what if this isn’t a season?
What if it’s medicine?
Because the study doesn’t just show women physicians are tired, it suggests that women physicians may be paying for the job with actual years of life.
And if you’re reading this while you’re eating a granola bar for dinner at 10 p.m. because you were too busy to eat today, you are not alone.
And Then There’s the Most Devastating Finding: Black Physicians Have the Highest Mortality Gap
The most striking inequity in the paper wasn’t gender.
It was race.
Black workers had higher mortality than white workers across all occupations (which we already know), but the Black-to-white mortality ratio was largest among physicians:
Black physicians had more than double the mortality rate of white physicians.
Let’s pause here.
Physicians are supposed to be the “protected class” of healthcare workers: high income, high education, and access to care.
And yet the racial mortality gap is worse in physicians than in many other professions. Even becoming a physician does not insulate Black women from the health effects of structural racism. If you ever needed evidence that systemic inequity is not solved by individual achievement, there it is.
So What’s Killing Physicians?
When people talk about physician mortality, the conversation almost always lands on suicide. And yes, suicide matters. It is real, devastating, and still too common. But in this study, suicide accounted for less than 5% of physician deaths, and suicide mortality among physicians was similar to that of other high-income occupations. So if we reduce physician mortality to suicide alone, we miss the bigger story. Physicians are dying of the same things everyone else dies of: cancer, heart disease, and injuries.
Physicians aren’t dying only because of acute despair. We’re dying because of chronic depletion.
If you’re burned out, it doesn’t just make you unhappy; it’s a physiological state that causes long-term stress injury. It changes sleep, metabolism, immune function, cognition, emotional regulation, and cardiovascular risk. It shapes behavior. It changes how often you exercise, how you eat, whether you go to your own doctor, and whether you believe your body deserves care.
Burnout is not a vibe. Burnout is a health hazard.
The “Second Shift” Is Not a Metaphor
The authors point toward something many of us have lived without ever having language for: the “second shift,” the domestic workload women carry after the hospital shift ends.
If you are a woman physician, you already know this.
You may finish a 12-hour clinical day and still be responsible for:
scheduling the dentist
ordering the birthday present
noticing the teacher’s email
keeping track of who needs new shoes
feeding everyone
remembering your mother-in-law’s preferences
doing the emotional labor of your household like it’s your side hustle
And you may not even call it unfair, you just call it Tuesday. And for women physicians, the cumulative stress may be uniquely biologically costly.
So What Do We Do With This?
Let me be clear: I’m not sharing this to scare you. I’m sharing it because we’re not going to get out of this by meditating or trying yoga. The answer is to stop treating chronic depletion like it’s normal.
1. If your life feels unsustainable, believe yourself.
Your exhaustion is not an overreaction. It is data. Your nervous system is not being dramatic; it is keeping receipts.
2. Stop waiting for the magical “lighter season.”
There may not be one. The season won’t change until you change something. This isn’t pessimism, it’s a call to agency.
3. Redefine health as a professional responsibility
Not because you owe medicine a better version of yourself, but because you owe yourself a life that lasts.
The Final Question
The Harvard article was framed around a deceptively simple theme: What does normal look like?
Because if “normal” for women physicians means:
no mortality advantage
disproportionate burden
chronic stress exposure
delayed self-care
higher death rates from cancer
and persistent inequity even at the highest professional levels
Then normal is not acceptable. Normal is a warning sign.
What can you do right now to build a life that is healthier than the current “normal”? Block of an hour to make templates for notes so you don’t have to finish documentation during “pajama time?” Set a boundary against answering emails on weekends? Make an appointment with your PCP? (Or establish care with a PCP?) Noodle around with ChatGPT to figure out ways to manage life administration? (But wait, maybe somebody already has…)
Does knowing that you’re at a survival disadvantage because you’re a woman physician make you angry? Good. Use it to change your destiny. You were never meant to be the collateral damage of your own career.