Something interesting happened in Pakistan’s medical workforce over the last thirty years, and it went almost unnoticed: women stopped being a minority among new doctors and became the majority not just in one or two cities, but across every province, even the ones you’d expect to lag behind. That’s the easy headline.

The harder, more interesting question is what happens after registration. Turns out men are still more likely to go on and specialize than women. Some provinces push far more of their doctors into specialization than others do. And within specialties, the gender split gets extreme you’ll find fields that are almost entirely women and others that are almost entirely men, sitting right next to each other in the same registry.

We also went down a separate rabbit hole while working on this: a reviewer asked whether some of the “specialization” degrees in the data might actually just be foreign MBBS degrees mislabeled as something fancier. Worth checking, so we did degree by degree, university by university.