The white coat is increasingly pink: in five years six out of 10 doctors will be women

The pink wave is sweeping through Italian healthcare. In five years six out of ten doctors will be women. This is the projection of medical demography data processed, as every year, by the CED of the National Federation of the Order of Surgeons and Dentists, in anticipation of 8 March.

"If we add to these data - explains FNOMCeO President Filippo Anelli - the fact that the majority of those enrolled in medicine are women, we can foresee an increasingly female-dominated medical profession in the coming years

However, men still make up the majority, accounting for 52.5%, half a percentage point less than last year. However, if we look at doctors still working under the age of 70, it is women who hold the majority with 55%, whereas in 2025 they were 53%.

The future of the category will therefore be tinged with another colour: among those under 60, female doctors make up 59%. The gap widens in the 40 to 50 age group, where female doctors make up 63%, reaching almost 64% between the ages of 45 and 49. The situation flattens out somewhat in the 30 to 39 age group, with percentages between 56% and 57%, but the gap widens in the 20s, where we return to 60%.

There is an eighty-year difference between the longest-serving female doctors in Italia and the newest members of the Order. Isabella Picciotto and Natalia Prada, born in 1922, hold the record. The former is a dentist from Messina, the latter a paediatrician and neonatologist from Como with a passion for poetry. Their registrations date back to the post-war period and they are still two professionals over 100 years old. Until a few days ago, it was Perugia that boasted the oldest member: Maria Antonietta Caterini was in fact born in 1921 and would have celebrated her 80th birthday this year, but unfortunately she recently passed away and will be struck off the Register on 9 March. Two girls and a boy are the youngest Italian doctors, all born in 2002: among them, Dr. Douaa Kachtouli, born in Dubai on 7 September 2002 and enrolled since July last year in the Milan Medical Association.