Choose a Section
Challenges
March 19, 2026
4 min read
Add topic to email alerts
Receive an email when new articles are posted on
Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .
“
data-action=”subscribe”>
Subscribe
We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.
Back to Healio
Key takeaways:
- Women reported significantly higher burnout and lower professional fulfillment than men.
- Reducing barriers to self-valuation could significantly reduce gender differences in burnout..
Reducing barriers to self-care and self-compassion for clinicians could significantly reduce burnout and improve professional fulfillment.
Survey results from more than 16,000 clinicians found women have a significantly higher rate of burnout than men, but those differences were fully mediated when accounting for differences in five factors, particularly self-valuation and alignment of values between clinicians and organizations.
“Caring for others and caring for ourselves doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game,” Miriam T. Stewart, MD, assistant vice president and chief well-being officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and associate professor of clinical pediatrics at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, told Healio.
“We can engineer the health care delivery environment to make it possible for physicians to do both — and to do both really well — because that’s what we know is going to drive that long-term success of the health care system.”
‘Negative impacts’
Burnout remains a prominent concern within health care.
Healio previously reported on survey data from more than 7,000 physicians that showed a decrease in burnout from 2021 to 2023. However, 45.2% of respondents still experienced at least one symptom.
“We know that physician burnout has negative impacts on patients, on safety, on quality and on patient satisfaction,” Stewart said. “We know it has negative impacts to the health care system in terms of physician turnover and reduced access to care for patients. This question of how we can make this problem better has been burning on my mind and many people’s minds for a long time.”
Prior research also has shown women score higher on burnout and lower on professional fulfillment than men.
“That has been found again and again and again,” Stewart explained. “Our group wanted to better understand why there is this consistently found association with women physicians having higher rates of burnout.”
Stewart and colleagues used cross-sectional survey data collected between October 2019 and July 2021 from 15 organizations in the Healthcare Professional Well-Being Academic Consortium to investigate.
They included responses from 16,731 clinicians (51% men; 55.9% aged 30-49 years; 63.6% white).
Factors associated with burnout and professional fulfillment among women served as the primary endpoint. Factors evaluated included control over schedule, electronic medical record helpfulness, leadership support, self-valuation and values alignment.
‘Different pressures’
Significantly more women reported burnout than men (42% vs. 33%; P < .001) and significantly less said they felt professionally fulfilled (34% vs. 46%; P < .001).
Women reported significantly lower satisfaction with control over schedule, leadership support, self-valuation and values alignment than men (all P < .001), with a small but statistically significantly higher average score for satisfaction with the EMR (P = .03).
In a mediation model including all five factors, researchers found no significant difference in burnout between men and women, but the difference in professional fulfillment remained significant.
In the burnout analysis, self-valuation, which asked about the capacity to prioritize one’s own needs and how clinicians view themselves in relation to mistakes, had the greatest impact on disparities in burnout, accounting for 63% of the overall difference between women and men.
“I was initially surprised, but then in thinking about it a little bit more, I actually wasn’t,” Stewart said. “We know from the literature that there are different pressures that women physicians are facing compared to their male colleagues both at home and at work.
“There is robust literature around what patients expect of their physicians based on gender. Patients speak more to women physicians during visits. They send them more electronic health record messages. There’s this relational expectation, which I think leads to higher quality of care in the end. We know that women physicians have better outcomes in many settings, but it takes more time, and the system is not always resourced to make that time possible.”
Values alignment between clinicians and organizations mediated 21% of the difference in burnout.
“A generalized example of this might be, is my health care organization making it easier for me to take care of the patients who are most vulnerable?” Stewart said. “Are the values I have about taking care of patients manifested in the policies and priorities of the organization?”
In the professional fulfillment analysis, values alignment (34%) and self-valuation (32%) had the greatest mediating effect.
“I don’t feel surprised that the models are different,” Stewart said. “The construct of burnout is very different than the construct of professional fulfillment. Burnout occurs when job demands exceed the resources to meet those demands. It’s a measure of depletion. Professional fulfillment relates to whether or not people are contributing in the ways that are most meaningful to them. It’s not surprising that a model that mediates one is not going to be the full answer to the other.”
Researchers acknowledged study limitations, including a survey response rate of around 50%.
‘A hopeful frontier’
Stewart said she was “looking forward” to future research into other factors that could explain the gender differences in professional fulfillment.
“I’m hesitant to speculate,” she said. “As we learned in this study, you can’t predict. We probably wouldn’t have predicted this outcome on the burnout side.”
Intervention trials may be more important though.
CHOP is currently piloting AI scribes to support documentation and give clinicians more time back. The hospital also is supporting clinicians who are lactating, making sure they have enough time to pump without being penalized if they see fewer patients.
“We’re ready for some trials that target the barriers to self-care and self-compassion, and I think they are going to benefit everyone, not just women physicians, because we know self-valuation is associated with burnout for all physicians,” Stewart said.
She has a hopeful outlook when looking at burnout and the steps organizations are taking to address it.
“Over the course of my career, as I’ve grown in the field of well-being, I see institutions increasingly investing in this, recognizing the importance, recognizing the impact on quality, safety and the patient experience, recognizing the impact on revenue and the ability to do the care,” Stewart said. “I’m seeing institutions increasingly investing in this, and I do think we’re seeing a tide of improvement.
“I’m excited about what new technologies and new health care delivery models have to offer in terms of transformational change in the burdens associated with healthcare delivery. I do see a hopeful frontier.”
For more information:
Miriam T. Stewart, MD, can be reached at stewartm2@chop.edu.
Published by:
Ask a clinical question and tap into Healio AI’s knowledge base.
- PubMed, enrolling/recruiting trials, guidelines
- Clinical Guidance, Healio CME, FDA news
- Healio’s exclusive daily news coverage of clinical data
Learn more
Add topic to email alerts
Receive an email when new articles are posted on
Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .
“
data-action=”subscribe”>
Subscribe
We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.
Back to Healio
