Is medicine a family tradition?
Investigating the heritability of professional occupations
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BMJ Publishing
Group Ltd.
Interactive
Does medicine run in families? Polyakova and colleagues have
explored data from Swedish educational records, to see whether
physicians had relatives that also trained as medical professionals.
They also analysed data from lawyers and their families to see if the
pattern would also hold true for another professional occupation
A detailed breakdown of the
proportions of people born in
the selected year, with the
same occupation as at least
one sibling, parent, and so on.
Some very small values have
been removed for data
protection reasons
Select the data to show using the checkboxes at the top
left of the diagram. Hover over individual years of birth to
show a detailed breakdown on the “family tree” below
Grandparents
Aunts or uncles
Parents
Siblings
Doctors
Lawyers
25%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
1968
1968
20.1%
8.2%
20.1%
8.2%
20.1%
8.2%
20.1%
8.2%
Siblings
Parents
Doctors
Lawyers
Aunts or uncles
Grandparents
Proportion of relations with the same occupation, by year of birth
DRAFT