Abstract: Women made tremendous inroads into the medical profession in the late nineteenth century. By 1900, women constituted more than 10 percent of practicing physicians in some cities. Progress, however, did not continue into the twentieth century, as the fraction female among American physicians actually declined after 1900. This reversal is often linked to the professionalization of medical practice and the associated changes

in medical education that led to a wave of medical school closures. Using a newly constructed panel data set of medical colleges, we show that women's access to medical education was blocked not only by the closure of schools with traditionally high female enrollments, but also by the shrinking number of seats for women at the schools that survived. We find that female enrollment dropped when schools added requirements for pre-medical school college coursework. We also find that school rules and state regulations requiring hospital internships further decreased women's enrollment in medical schools.

Bio: Melissa Thomasson is the Julian Lange Professor of Economics at Miami University and studies the economic history of health insurance and health care. Thomasson is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, has served on the editorial boards of two journals in her field, and is the Executive Director and a former Trustee of the Cliometric Society. She has testified before Congress and her findings have been cited in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Yale Law Journal, in reports prepared for the U.S. Senate and the United Nations, and by Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI).  Thomasson’s work has been featured on “This American Life” and “All Things Considered,” and in articles in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and a Washington Post podcast in addition to numerous other outlets.