Gender and the demand for medical care

The consumption of a set of diverse medical services is analysed in an effort to determine the sources of high utilization by women. Unlike previous studies of gender and the demand for medical services, the range of services investigated allows us to draw conclusions about the influence of physicians as agents. We use a modified version of the almost-ideal demand model in the empirical analysis which, unlike the double-log, quadratic, or linear demand models, is consistent with constraints imposed by economic theory. Through decomposition of the variance, it was found that if women reported the same series of health indicators as men, their use of most services would fall below that of men.