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Female doctors are by and large hiring nannies to give their children the stay at home mom experience, just with someone other than mom. Not daycare. These are, after all, high income women- they buy the cadillac plan for childcare, not the base model. There will functionally always be more teenagers on a gap year than there are high income mothers of young children, this equation is unlikely to change.
A much bigger and more immediate objection to the high female percentage in medicine- it isn't going to be, and probably shouldn't be, 0%, because like gynecologists- is that a limited number of doctors are produced per year and women doctors on average retire early and work fewer hours before then.
The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years, or providing the skin contact and natural maternal affection that leads to healthy offspring. And because women are averse to pairing with men below their income unless the men compensate with unusual attractiveness, they have a lower rate of marriage than they would otherwise have. And because the school years are intense, they are delaying marriage. This dysgenic effect is more serious than the economic inefficiency effect, because you can’t easily produce more high iq citizens. In a pronatal culture, high iq women have more children than average, learning the skills of husband-acquiring and homemaking at an earlier age.
Besides AWFLs being perhaps the most likely demographic to breastfeed, there's no convincing evidence for benefits of breastfeeding outside of a slight reduction in minor rashes or gastrointestinal upset in babies. Nobody has demonstrated long-run benefits for the child of any kind.
This... doesn't pass the sniff test. Formula almost certainly isn't quite as good as breastmilk and we know early childhood nutrition is very important.
It's a subject ripe for a more classic 'political correctness' to overtake it since there are mothers out there who can not breastfeed and the notion that these loving parents are depriving their children of optimal nutrition and upbringing is charged to say the least.
If you've ever been in a maternity ward it's difficult to convey how hard the staff pushes for breastfeeding. In my deep blue area mothers who just had a C section and have a baby in the NICU are constantly pressured to breastfeed (despite the pain from the surgery site while holding the baby) and pump to provide milk to the baby. All the usual progressive suspects (WHO, APA) are pro-breastfeeding. We are very much in the "breast is best" era.
And having been around a person who could not breastfeed, the only reassurance that can possibly be offered is 'it doesn't really matter' and 'babies that are breastfed also get 'gastrointestinal upset' all the time, it's not your fault'.
I don't disagree that we are in the "breast is best" era, but the subject is nevertheless ripe for political correctness to overtake it.
If political correctness were to overtake it, it would have already happened.
Things have been moving fast for the past two decades, that doesn't mean everything has happened.
In either case it's besides the point. The emotional weakspot of breastfeeding is obvious in this context. Not wanting to make those who can't breastfeed feel bad is exactly the type of thing that skews the lib/left/progressive academia to churn out bad research.
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