The table provides details about the number of medical professions in Australia in every ten-year period (1986, 1996, and 2006), while bar charts compare their percentages in terms of gender and birthplace.
Overall, Australia experienced an increase in the quantity of doctors over the study period, with significant growth registered in 2006. It is also clear from the bar charts that more males worked as doctors compared to their female counterparts in all three periods, and according to the second one, while doctors born in Australia almost doubled those born abroad, both figures reached parity in the third ten years.
In detail, in 1986, the total number of doctors who worked in Australia accounted for 23,720, and it grew by almost 6,000 every ten years, amounting to 29,060 in 1996, before rising to 35,450 in 2006.
As for the bar chart representing Australian gender disparity in the percentages of doctors, three times more men used to work as doctors than females, standing at 75 and 25%, respectively, in 1986. From the time onward, the figures followed different directions, with males declining to 60% as the number of female doctors climbed to 39% in 2006. A similar trend was observed in the next chart showing the birthplaces of doctors who worked in Australia. In 1986 and 1996, more than half of all doctors who worked in Australia were natives, while the remaining were foreigners, albeit a slight change in the latter period, with the percentage of Australian doctors falling to 59 as overseas doctors rose to 41%. Notably, 2006 saw an equal proportion of doctors who were born in Australia and overseas, at 50%.