Researchers analyzed the professional trajectories of almost 2,000 midcareer physician-researchers. Chosen because of their similarity to one another in professional interests, aptitude and ambition, the doctors in the study each had received a highly prestigious research grant early in their careers and worked not in private practice but in academic medical centers. The researchers examined a wide range of career factors, including the number of hours worked, professional achievements, leadership positions, marital status, parental status and salary.

As in some earlier studies, the researchers found a difference in income, with a male doctor’s annual salary averaging just over $200,000 and a female’s averaging about $168,000. And like previous researchers, they found that the female doctors tended to be in lower-paying specialties, have fewer publications, work fewer hours and hold fewer administrative leadership positions.

But when these researchers ran the numbers again, this time adjusting for differences in specialty, publications, academic rank, hours worked and leadership positions, they found that the expected average salary for women still fell behind that of their male colleagues. The male doctors made over $12,000 per year more than the women.

Calculated over the course of a 30-year career, the income gap based on sex alone amounted to over $350,000.

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In 2007, Kurt Edwards figured he would be stacking and racking 80-pound boxes of dog food and celery in the back of a grocery store for the rest of his working life. And he was fine with that.

But that June, after nine years on the job, layoff notices arrived on the warehouse floor at the Farmer Jack store in Detroit where he worked. His employer, Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, closed the Farmer Jack chain. Today he still does a lot of lifting, but of people, not boxes. Mr. Edwards joined the ranks of former warehouse, factory and autoworkers trading in their coveralls and job uncertainty for nurses’ scrubs.

At 49, divorced with no children, he now tends to patients on the graveyard shift at Sheffield Manor Nursing and Rehab Center, a two-story, gray brick building in a ramshackle neighborhood on Detroit’s west side. Interviewed last month, he says he is making about $70,000 annually, $20,000 more than he did at the warehouse.

The story of how he made the transition is one that men like him appear to be telling with increasing frequency, and the demand for their services is what is setting so many of them on similar paths.

Hard figures are elusive, but the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth estimates a shortage of 18,000 nurses in the state by 2015 — and the labor force is adapting.

Oakland University in nearby Rochester, Mich., has established a program specifically to retrain autoworkers in nursing — about 50 a year since 2009. And the College of Nursing at Wayne State University in Detroit is enrolling a wide range of people switching to health careers, including former manufacturing workers, said Barbara Redman, its dean. “They bring age, experience and discipline,” she said.

David Pomerville brings a few more years than Mr. Edwards. A 57-year-old nursing student, he spent most of his career as an automotive vibration engineer, including almost 10 years at General Motors. His pink slip arrived in April 2009.

At the time, Mr. Pomerville was earning almost $110,000 a year at the General Motors Milford Proving Ground in Milford Township, Mich.

But having watched another round of bloodletting at G.M. three years earlier, he had already decided on nursing as his Plan B. “I thought, ‘Well, I worked on cars for this long, now I’m going to work on people for a while,’ ” he said.

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In October, School of Nursing Dean Afaf Meleis noted that 94.6 percent of freshmen nurses are female. This marks a 10-percent increase compared to the current sophomore class, where 84.6 percent of nurses are female.

When pressed on the subject in a later interview, Meleis acknowledged the gender imbalance among nurses. She pointed to the school’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan as a possible model to increase the number of male nurses trained at Penn.

Meleis also pointed to different groups available to nursing minorities, including the Male Association of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.

MAN-UP, led by its President Nursing junior Spencer Stubbs, works to fuel dialogue among male nurses about their practice and education. The group also works to recruit male nursing students through high school outreach.

In comparison to the Nursing School, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences suffers a lesser degree of gender inequality. The undergraduate population of SEAS is now 34 percent female. While this percentage is higher than the national average of 17.8 percent, most of the equality is seen in the school’s Bioengineering Department.

In departments like Electrical Engineering, Engineering senior Willis Zhang says that there may be only two or three women in a class of 30 students. However, Zhang maintained that “if there were more girls, it wouldn’t be any different.” When asked about the measures SEAS is taking to create a more diverse population, Zhang said “I think they’re trying, but I don’t know what they could do.”

In order to counter inequality, students launched Alpha Omega Epsilon this year, an Engineering sorority designed to foster community for women engineers on campus. The Engineering school also created an “Advancing Women in Engineering” program.

“Since its launch four years ago, AWE has led the way in increasing our success in both recruiting and retaining our women engineers,” Engineering Vice Dean for Academic Affairs Joseph Sun wrote in an email.

The Engineering school has also focused on recruiting new students through outreach to local middle and high schools.

However, the gender divide persists.

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