Greater Numbers Of American Women Entering Medical Field

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. For the last several years, men have outnumbered women in medical schools by a huge margin. Lately though, the number of women applying for medical school has increased dramatically.

The first reason is that feminism has altered the perception that people have, females in particular, of jobs that should be done by females. You will find more women choosing careers in law enforcement, engineering, and medicine. Not only are women applying for these spots, but the medical schools are being pressured more than ever to accept more women. Antidiscrimination laws and regulations have made tremendous strides in terms of modifying the treatment of women in the workplace and in schools. The laws have been put into place slowly and the progress has not been linear, but haphazardly.

While schools often track dropout information, there are currently no statistics on the number of women who fail to complete medical school. Older research illustrated a larger number of women dropping out of medical school than men. However, the rationale for their departure was not academic. When you talk to women currently practicing in the medical field, they say that the dropout rates between men and women are just about equal, in large part because there are more women and so the pressure women feel can be more easily shared and dealt with. Females will typically feel more comfortable challenging practices that they seem discriminatory due to the growth in their numbers.

A good example is the professor at a state-run medical school who started his first lecture each semester with a little joke intended to welcome his mostly male students. The students were asked to name the word that did not belong - egg, sex, woman or rug; the answer was sex because you can't beat sex. This joke is nothing compared to some of the other disgusting behavior women have had to put up with in medical school through the years, but it is still enough to show that they weren't respected. However, thanks to the increased numbers of female applicants, those jokes - along with all the nude pictures and pinups that pop up in lecture slides and textbooks - may soon fall by the wayside.

Besides having to deal with the disgusting jokes, there was an incident involving a woman at a very large state university was not allowed to participate in a physical examination of a male patient because of the fact that he would be nude and she would be able to see his genitals. Meanwhile her husband, another student, was allowed to complete a pelvic examination on a woman patient. There are other common problems, such as interviewers that almost always asked women about their family and marriage plans but never asked any of the men these questions. There were other things to contend with like the lack of women on the faculty or the dated thoughts that women were not able to be trusted to practice medicine, whether they were licensed or not; this notion was especially true with specialty medicine and surgery.

When it comes to the admissions questions about marriage and career choices, it has been said that women were denied according to their answers, and that they couldn't give a correct answer to the questions, even though this has been denied by a female faculty member. An example of a male interviewer's misconstruction of a female's answers is as follows: If the woman answers that she will have day care for her children, the interviewer claims she should be home with them rather than at work being a doctor. If she tells the interviewer she does want children, the interviewer will tell her her heart isn't in the right place.

After so many interviews were conducted in this manner, the feeling grew that female applicants were more sensitive than men. However, this claim was shot down as being a female stereotype. One second year female medical student has personally witnessed some very unprincipled women and some very caring men, but empathy is still treated as something determined by biology and sociology.

One particular med school dean offered the opinion that overall, females have certain characteristics that are very appreciated in the medical field. Women are often cast as the more open and sensitive gender, beginning when they are young girls, and this can be a positive asset in medicine. 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.

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