In families where both Mommy and Daddy are physicians, mothers put in fewer hours at work while fathers work about the same number of hours compared with dual-doctor couples without children. This is the conclusion from a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which included 9,868 physicians who are two-physician couples.

"Little is known about how physicians within dual-physician couples adjust hours worked due to children or whether sex differences, if they exist, have changed over time, especially because physicians of both sexes have increasingly emphasized the importance of shared parenting responsibility," the authors wrote.To find out, researchers estimated hours worked per week for married dual-physician couples using the American Community Survey from 2000 through 2015, a nationally representative annual survey of about 3 million households. The authors included individuals whose reported occupation and that of their spouse were physician or surgeon.

"I have been interested in using large data to better understand how the work and professional lives of male and female physicians differ," explained lead author Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, MA. "One natural question to ask is how male and female physicians in dual-physician couples respond differently in their work hours with the arrival of children. We hypothesized that female physicians would adjust their hours worked whereas male physicians in the couple would not."

Dr. Jena and colleagues limited their analyses to physicians age 25 to 50 to focus on childbearing years. Couples with children younger than 1 year old were excluded because their reported hours may have reflected hours worked immediately after the child was born. Also, same-sex couples were excluded because the researchers were focused on sex differences within couples.

After analyzing the data, Dr. Jena and colleagues concluded that "weekly hours worked by women with children were lower than among women without children, whereas similar differences were not observed among men."

Specifically, in couples without children, men worked 57 hours per week and women worked 52.4 hours. In couples with children (whose youngest child was age 1 to 2), men worked almost the same number of hours (55.3 hours—a difference of 1.7 hours less) as the men without children, but women with children worked significantly fewer hours (41.5 hours—a difference of 10.9 hours less) than women without children.As the youngest child grew older, men with children still worked about the same hours as men without children. However, the hours worked by women with children remained lower compared with women without children.

"We actually found more than just that," Dr. Jena said. "On average, females in dual-physician couples with children are working 40 hours per week. We also found, though did not report in the study, that increases in part-time work (defined as less than 20 hours of work per week) were larger for women vs men in dual-physician couples who had children."

Then again, women in certain specialities may be more likely to both work fewer hours and have children, which would confound the analysis because the researchers were unable to adjust for physician specialities, which weren't available.

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