This article was originally published on October 1, 2024, when Covista was Adtalem Global Education. It was updated on February 5, 2026.

Covista’s institutions combined graduate more women with Doctor of Medicine degrees than the average U.S. medical school. It’s not even close.

It took until the 2020s for there to be a year with more female than male Doctor of Medicine graduates. Covista’s scale puts it ahead of U.S. medical schools in graduating women.

For the 2023-24 academic year, U.S. medical schools graduated 72 women on average, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Combined, Covista’s American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and Ross University School of Medicine graduated 419—more than five times as many as the average for U.S. medical schools. The U.S. medical school with the highest number of female MDs graduated 166.

Covista Graduates More Female Physicians

For the 2023-24 academic year, 72% of U.S. medical schools graduated more female than male MDs. Covista schools did as well, but at a much greater scale—5x as many female MD graduates compared with U.S. med schools average. The highest number of female MD grads from a U.S. med school was 166, with the average being 72. Adtalem institutions graduating a whopping 419 female MDs.

Why It Matters

The U.S. needs more physicians. If underserved populations had the same access to healthcare as those with fewer barriers, the U.S. would need between 117,100 and 202,800 additional physicians (as of 2021), according to a 2024 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges. 

Women physicians have strong patient outcomes and success in their careers. In April 2024, the Annals of Internal Medicine spurred a debate that’s still causing a stir with the publication of “Comparison of Hospital Mortality and Readmission Rates by Physician and Patient Sex.” Researchers looked at a sample of Medicare hospital patients over 30 days to see how many were readmitted or died and correlated it with the gender of their doctor. The peer-reviewed article found that women physicians had better patient outcomes.

Education and Women Doctors in U.S. History

It’s been fewer than 200 years since the first woman was admitted to a U.S. medical school. (Male students thought it was a prank.) As an 1849 graduate, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell cofounded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.

• In 1883, of 54,500 doctors in the U.S., fewer than 300 were women.
• By the mid-1960s, women made up only 6% of U.S. medical school enrollment.
• A decade later in the ’70s, women comprised 16% of their med school graduating classes.

Graduation rates for women and men started to approach fifty-fifty in the early 2000s. During the last few years, woman have overtaken men as medical school graduates, officially surpassing men in the U.S. for the first time during the 2020-21 academic year. Shortly thereafter during the 2022-23 academic year, Covista institutions graduated more men than women for the first time with 419 female graduates and 369 male graduates.