The first Indian woman physician, Anandibai Joshi, graduated in 1886. About 125 years later, Indian women started to outnumber men in admissions to medical colleges and the trend continues to grow stronger by the year: over the last five years, India has produced over 4,500 more female doctors than male ones.In India, women constituted 51% of the students joining medical colleges, cornering 23,522 seats in 2014-15 compared to 22,934 men. This increase is in keeping with the worldwide trend. In fact, in the neighbourhood, Pakistan and Bangladesh have much higher proportions of women in medical colleges, 70% and 60%, respectively.However, there is a serious shortage of female doctors in India. According to a paper titled Human Resources for Health in India, published in 2011 in the medical journal Lancet, only 17% of all allopathic doctors and 6% of those in rural areas are women. This is less than one female allopathic doctor per 10,000 population in rural areas (0.5), whereas the ratio is 6.5 in urban areas. The number of female doctors per 10,000 population ranges from 7.5 in Chandigarh to 0.26 in Bihar. According to a paper on women in medicine published in the journal Indi5 an Anthropologist by sociologist Dr Mita Bhadra, the gender 51.1 gap persists at the post-graduation and doctoral levels--the percentage of female doctors here is around one-third of male doctors. She also observed that positions of leadership in academics and 50.8 administration are still mostly occupied by men.51.1 In Pakistan, though 70% of medical students were women, only 23% of registered doctors were female because a large number of those who graduated never took to practising. Bangladesh produced 3,164 female doctors 46.and 2,383 male doctors in 2013. The trend of more women joining the medical profession is welcomed as female doctors are seen as more committed and caring.A paper on women in medicine published by Dr Rakesh Chadda and Dr Mamta Sood of by Dr Rakesh Chadda and Dr Mamta Sood of the psychiatry department of AIIMS in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies noted that medicine has been a male-dominated profession because it demands long working hours that are disadvantageous to women who, even today, struggle to juggle career and family responsibilities.The paper noted that though women were earlier largely restricted to fields like obstetrics, gynaecology and paediatrics, this was changing. "There has always been a preponderance of women in preclinical subjects like anatomy, physiology and biochemistry and paraclinical subjects like pharmacology, pathology and microbiology rights from the 1970s. However, when a department is headed by a woman, the percentage of women faculty in the department goes up," says Dr Chadda.