Background: Female physicians are more likely than male physicians to make professional adjustments to accommodate household responsibilities, such as childrearing (1). Although differences in marriage characteristics between male and female physicians may partly explain this finding, national data on characteristics of physician marriages are lacking (2). For example, spouses of female physicians may on average work more hours outside the home than spouses of male physicians, which would place relatively greater pressure on female physicians to adjust their professional responsibilities for household work.

Methods: We performed analyses using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) obtained between 2000 and 2015 ...