More Females Look Into Medical Vocations
There are more women than ever applying for spots in medical schools all across the country
, which is changing the way medicine is taught and practiced. In recent years, the number of female applicants and male applicants that were accepted into medical schools were at an approximate fifty-fifty ratio. Today, however, females are submitting a far greater number of applications. Two major causes are contributing to this fact.This can be contributed to a couple of things, one being the feminist movement showing that women aren't subject to a certain kind of work. Legal and engineering careers are also seeing spikes in the number of females among the ranks. Medical schools have been pressured by the changing culture to include more women in their incoming classes. There is also the noticeable effect from antidiscrimination laws being enforced, even though this effect has been quite slow and erratic.
Once women are admitted into the programs, we're not sure how they fare. At present, there is no research or tracking efforts in place to record female medical students who drop out. Older research illustrated a larger number of women dropping out of medical school than men. However, the rationale for their departure was not academic. These days female medical students say that the dropout rate is now probably equal between sexes because there are more women than ever to identify with; instead of being a very small minority, their numbers have increased to a large minority. Females will typically feel more comfortable challenging practices that they seem discriminatory due to the growth in their numbers.
As an example, a medical school lecturer decided to tell a joke to his dominantly male class on one occasion. Inappropriate or sexist jokes and remarks not only make female students feel uncomfortable, but can make them feel as if they had wandered in unwanted to an all boys' club. Even though this isn't half as bad as some of the things women were putting up with on an everyday basis in the hallway of schools, it is still bad enough to keep women from being respected. But as women grow in numbers, these practices and jokes will soon be taboo. So will hanging up naked posters of women to prank the professor.
The ladies aren't only dealing with crude humor by men, there are also other things that make no sense like the case of the student who wasn't allowed to participate in a physical examination of a male patient because he would be naked and she would be able to see his genitals. In the meantime in another classroom, the same woman's husband was able to perform a pelvic exam on a female patient. There was also the issue of the admissions interview where a woman was always asked about her career outlook, as well as her outlook on marriage and having a family, while these questions were never asked of men. Additional factors that serve to hinder female med students are the lack of females employed by universities on staff since these positions are not keeping up with the rise in female students, the accepted notion that after females get their licenses, they might decide not to go into the medical field after all, and the exclusion of females in certain practices, such as surgery.
A woman who is a faculty member at a medical school, who asked to be anonymous, remarked that she disagrees with female applicants being questioned about their plans in terms of having a family and getting married. She admitted that this question often keeps women out of medical school. There have been instances of male interviewers misconstruing a woman's answers to the family question and turning them into something he said. For example, if a student states that if she did have children she would have someone care for them while she was working, the interviewer would suggest that she just stay home and have babies. If she told the interviewer she was definitely going to have children, he would say she wasn't ready for medical school.
Again and again it became obvious that the male interviewers perceive women as possessing more sensitivity than their fellow male applicants. But this is chalked up to being another stereotype of women. Yet within the medical profession, it does appear to be a stereotype. Female medical students report that their female peers are ruthless, while some of their male counterparts are sensitive. Yet this stereotype of the sensitive woman and obtuse male persist as facts of life.
One dean at a prominent medical school commented that women actually bring much to table in the field and that traits that are seen more in women are in fact positive and make them good doctors. Women are definitely socialized to be more open and perceptive regarding emotions. He mentioned that in the medical field, this is an advantage in terms of patient care. Males tend to be more aggressive which is a trait that can work against them in medicine. But, she states that neither characteristic is a given in either gender.
by: nichole