Why Many Women Become Veterinarians And Few Become Engineers
Terrific long read by Christina Hoff Sommers at American.com. An excerpt:
Rachel Maines, a visiting scholar in science and technology studies at Cornell University, recently wrote an essay expressing amazement with women's progress in veterinary medicine compared with engineering. Nationally, women now comprise fully 77 percent of students in veterinary schools, compared with 8 percent in the 1960s. Maines writes, "To be sure, puppies are cuter than microchips, but most of what veterinarians do isn't about cute. Veterinary medicine...remains irreducibly bloody, messy, and often hazardous.... It certainly requires a rigorous scientific education that is at least as difficult and daunting as what engineering demands."If numerical inferiority were sufficient grounds for charges of discrimination, Congress would be holding hearings on the underrepresentation of men in higher education.
Maines is surprised that women have managed so rapidly to take over this male-centered, science-based field without the benefit of bias workshops or federal equity initiatives. Cornell, she notes, just received a $3.3 million grant from the NSF to build a "critical mass" of women in all the STEM disciplines--ASAP. It is a first principle of the equity movement that role models and mentors are essential for helping women to move ahead in a field. But where, asks Maines, were the mentors and role models in veterinary medicine? She urges her colleagues to study the mystery of what happened.Theorists like Baron-Cohen may have solved the mystery. If he is right, veterinary medicine would be a dream job for the scientifically gifted but empathy-driven female. This challenging and exciting field appeals to the feminine propensity to protect and nurture--and the desire to work with living things. There is an immense literature documenting male and female differences in choice of vocation. It also goes without saying that there are a lot of women who will defy the stereotype of their sex and gladly enter systematizing fields, free of people, children, or animals--professions like mechanical engineering, metallurgy, or agronomy. But the number of men eager to enter these fields is markedly greater.
Back to Math 55 for a moment. Baron-Cohen, along with many other scholars who write about cognitive sex differences, would not be surprised to learn that students who show up in 55 are overwhelmingly male. The Harvard registrar's office reports that a total of 17 women have completed the course since 1990. Still, the equity activists could be right that the few women who defy the stereotype and take such a course have to overcome a "chilly environment."
I located two female survivors--Sherry Gong, currently enrolled, and Kelley Harris, who completed Math 55 with an A last year. "Did you encounter a hostile environment in that class?" I asked Miss Harris. She laughed. "I loved my classmates!" When she once thought of dropping out, it was her male friends in the course who persuaded her to stay. Sherry Gong was taken aback when inquired whether she felt that women in math were unwelcome or marginalized. It was as if I had asked whether women had the vote. "It is 2007!" she reminded me. Sergei Bernstein, a young man now enrolled, told me, "We would like to have more girls."
Professor Emanuel said that although the discrimination report was 'widely praised in public, it was privately deplored and disparaged in the hallways of MIT.'
The research emphasizing the importance of biological differences in determining women's and men's career choices is not decisive, but it is serious and credible. So the question arises: How have so many officials at the NSF and NAS and so many legislators been persuaded that we are facing a science crisis that Title IX enforcement and gender-bias workshops can resolve?
How have so many officials at the NSF and NAS and so many legislators been persuaded that we are facing a science crisis that Title IX enforcement and gender-bias workshops can resolve?
Because they wanted to be persuaded.
dee nile at December 30, 2013 7:56 AM
"Did you encounter a hostile environment in that class?" I asked Miss Harris. She laughed. "I loved my classmates!""
Not the least surprising, in my experience, the men in these classes would fall all over themselves to help a woman.
"To be sure, puppies are cuter than microchips, but most of what veterinarians do isn't about cute."
True but it is not something you find or figure out on day one or year one. Odds are people who become vets were thinking/dreaming about being one through most of HS, a lot of years of momentum gets built up that can get one over the hill of not cute.
Joe J at December 30, 2013 8:18 AM
Former engineer here. One reason women would rather be veterinarians than engineers could be because employment prospects are better for veterinarians. There's such a glut of people with STEM degrees that most of us work outside the STEM field. Encouraging women to pursue engineering is good PR, good for colleges, and good for employers who want a hundred applicants per job opening, but it's not necessarily good for the woman who gets left with student loans but no STEM job.
Lori at December 30, 2013 8:41 AM
This reminds me of a press release I just read, about burn-outs in veterinary careers: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131204202735.htm
The burn-out rate is at 1 out of 7 per decade, but for women, it is 1 out of 5 per half-decade. Being that the field is female dominated, this seems to be a cause for concern, according to the press release.
Jack.Rayner at December 30, 2013 8:50 AM
Observations only.
I am male. I work as a mechanical engineer. In my career, I have worked with a number of female engineers, as superiors, as peers and as subordinates.
Some were good, some were bad, some were average. But not a one of them is still working - as an engineer. Just one that I know of - perhaps the finest practitioner of 3D-modelling I have ever worked with - is just now returning to the field after a 13-year hiatus. To raise a daughter. And she is having to work like fury to catch up. Even as smart as she is, she won't ever completely recover from the deficit.
Nowhere in the attached discussion does anyone dare touch upon the bleedin'-obvious, namely, that women choosing career directions are very well aware of what occupations will be more or less tolerant of their other, future life decisions. And they choose their college path to match. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that it is very hard indeed to get ahead as a rocket scientist if you want to work flexible hours or take a few years off to have children. The field moves too fast, it is incredibly hard to keep up or regain lost ground. Other fields are more - forgiving - of such choices.
I mentor a group of 8th-grade kids in the FIRST robot program. These kids (90% Asian/Indian, by-the-bye) are also 60-70% female. They are all wicked smart, much smarter than I was when I was 13. Why in the world would we suppose that these super-smart girls would not look at the world as it is (not as these Title-Niniacs wish it were) and say to themselves 'If I go into STEM as a career, it will inhibit other life choices I may want to have open to me. Why would I do that?' And so they choose business directions, or one of the softer sciences where they have more options that will not impact their career directions so severely.
I have a long-term connection with MSUCVM - check my handle if confused - and I think I understand some of what's going on with veterinary education. Our large animal vet is an MSUCVM graduate, and we knew her as a student.
Vet training is incredibly hard - harder than med school, I think. It's also very costly. There is a serious over-supply of vets in the US, which has depressed salaries and left many recently-qualified vets with poor prospects, heavy debt and few choices.
Vet students are overwhelmingly-female. And yet large-animal vets are predominantly male. Why is that? It's because most female vets gravitate towards small-animal practice (reasonable and flexible hours, hardly any lying the the cold mud), state and Federal research work, the animal-health industry, or academia - training more vets.
Again, these hyper-smart women can look at the world as it is, and see where the directions lie that will be more favorable to their other life choices, and then they head in that direction.
Why would we expect otherwise? And why would we refuse to accept that these extremely smart women are making rational choices, and instead run off blaming everything on unquantifiable biases, and then demand that remedial regulation is required to enforce an 'equality' that the female subjects themselves don't want or expect? Most of these women are quite smart enough to figure out the consequences of their choices.
Most claims of gender bias in academia or industry are complete nonsense. Most hiring managers in both fields are heavily incentivized to hire women, to meet 'diversity' and 'equal-opportunity' goals. If more women are not getting into the highest echelons of the STEM sphere, it's not that they're being held back by antediluvian biases - it's (mostly) because that's not a place they want to go.
llater,
llamas
llamas at December 30, 2013 8:54 AM
@ Joe J, who wrote:
"Did you encounter a hostile environment in that class?" I asked Miss Harris. She laughed. "I loved my classmates!""
Not the least surprising, in my experience, the men in these classes would fall all over themselves to MEET a woman.
There. fixed it for you.
llater,
llamas
llamas at December 30, 2013 8:56 AM
I think that this is an excellent point, that it is not scientific rigor that keeps women out of some professions, but something else entirely... or to be specific, a bunch of somethings else. Here are a few possibilities:
1. Completing veterinary school confers a title ('doctor") and the implied respect that goes with that.
2. Working as a veterinarian is a path to business ownership, most vets are self-employed or work as contractors to established practices. Entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency are inextricably tied together in this profession.
3. Animals don't judge the doctor's competence on whether or not s/he has XX versus XY chromosomes or presents as male or female.
4. Collaboration in a practice when you graduate is a lot easier on someone's self-esteem if you don't feel that you're co-workers treat you like an instant outsider for having breasts. (I once had a coworker sing the "one of these things is not like the other" when he entered the conference room where I was hosting a meeting in a computer engineering department.)
It's a complex issue, and as you so rightly point out, it's clearly not about the capacity for hard science and mathematics. Those stem areas that are lacking in women's participation are in that situation for a reason... and it's probably not a very simple answer...
Stacey Simmons at December 30, 2013 9:04 AM
llamas I'd correct that to say meet a woman who isn't turned off by talk of computers, science, and sci-fi.
Joe J at December 30, 2013 9:24 AM
The only veterinarian I ever knew had to do a lot of experiments on cats etc during his education. It sounded awful, especially for an animal-lover, but I don't know if that's a mandatory part of the education or some work-study he chose. He later became a large-animal doc.
carol at December 30, 2013 9:48 AM
Having majored in both, pre vet, and engineering before finally resigning myself to just get the damn degree, and settling on history, I can tell you with certainty that veterinary medicine and med school for that matter, is less than half as math intensive as an engineering degree.
A lot of med school, and veterinary school is rote memorization, something women excel at. The same is true with a pharmacy major.
Differential equations, and Transport phenomena is on a whole nother plane of mathematical difficulty compared to the simplified calculus, statistics, and chemistry formulas required for a med or vet degree.
Isab at December 30, 2013 11:30 AM
Ms. Simmons, you make some interesting observations so let me add mine.
Since I work in a hospital with women (about 40% physicians are women, about 85% or nurses are), I can definitely tell you how it works within the hospital. Doctor-to-doctor interactions is almost all based on competency (and a smaller degree of personality), that is, if you suck at your job (regardless of gender), you are disdained. However, where I see a lot of issues is female nurses interacting with female doctors. It is not uncommon to see female nurses react with outright hostility to orders given by female physicians (the same is not true for them interacting with nurses). This seldom happens with male doctors interacting with female nurses; it basically never happens with male doctors and male nurses.
If you are talking about patient responses to a physician, I have never seen or heard about a female physician being disrespected just based on their gender. Just like racism, restrictions apply when talking about old school baby boomers and older folks. But for the most part, the world has long since moved on. It does not mean it is gone but that the movement is trying to look for monsters where there are none.
coffee! at December 30, 2013 11:55 AM
Beware hardcore leftists on a social justice mission to save the future:
No Donna. Our nation's future depends upon having well-trained and competent engineers, not a socially diverse mix of engineers.
We'll be okay as long as the diversity goals dont' take precedence over competence. If changing some attitudes in academia leads to more women and minorities in engineering, that's good. But if dumbing down the standards is done in order to reach the diversity goals, we'll have the equivalent of social scientists designing our bridges, computers, airplanes, automobiles, waste disposal systems, HVAC systems, fire suppression systems, etc. (there's a whole lot that engineers build beyond computers and space missions).
My sister is an engineer and works for an engineering consulting company. In her experience, barely-competent diversity program graduates in engineering are ruining the field - and tainting the competent women and non-Asian minorities in the field.
How'd you like to be in a skyscraper with a fire suppression system designed by a diversity program graduate in engineering who never had to pass rigorous examination standards or advanced math classes? Towering Inferno anyone?
When the University of Miami has at least one Top 25 engineering and/or science program, then I'll listen to the former political science professor on science and technology education excellence.
Conan the Grammarian at December 30, 2013 12:20 PM
"How'd you like to be in a skyscraper with a fire suppression system designed by a diversity program graduate in engineering who never had to pass rigorous examination standards or advanced math classes? Towering Inferno anyone?"
There is a check already in place for this. To be able to sign off on any design, you must be a P.E. (Professional engineer) who has passed a rigorous initial exam, called the E.I.T (engineer in training) followed by a four year stint of working for a P.E followed by the actual PE licensing exam.
This is no piece of cake, and only about 20 percent of engineers ever obtain their P. E. License.
Isab at December 30, 2013 1:37 PM
"This is no piece of cake, and only about 20 percent of engineers ever obtain their P. E. License. "
Just wait until, some feminist group demands that be changed since it is not resulting in equal numbers of men and women passing.
Joe J at December 30, 2013 1:51 PM
"This is no piece of cake, and only about 20 percent of engineers ever obtain their P. E. License. "
Just wait until, some feminist group demands that be changed since it is not resulting in equal numbers of men and women passing.
Posted by: Joe J at December 30, 2013 1:51 PM
I would suspect that there are not enough women or minorities even attempting the exam, to make their pass or fail rate statically meaningful.
This exam is also governed by 50 state boards of licensing, examination, and registration so attacking it at a national level is pretty useless.
Isab at December 30, 2013 2:31 PM
In hiring into a programming start-up that is admittedly probably in the wrong geography, I've recently had:
- One guy make it out of probation
- Two get let go for underperformance in probation
- Two guys come in to interview completely unprepared
- Two women bail out - literally, one broke down in tears and ran out the door over the skills assessment, the other past probation and resigned as we were offering her the full time job.
Both women later said to the softer side of the company that they weren't happy with the prospect of working long hours in a start-up, had concerns about work-life balance, or otherwise felt like the whole plan of being a programmer was not for them.
The Title IXers are invested in money in the victimization-peddling machine that butters their bred, and they don't care of those two women are or aren't happy - they know they can't change the outcomes to their liking without breaking the American economy, they are playing with house money and other people's lives, and they assume that some day will never come.
MrGreenMan at December 30, 2013 3:23 PM
I would suspect that there are not enough women or minorities even attempting the exam, to make their pass or fail rate statically meaningful.
This exam is also governed by 50 state boards of licensing, examination, and registration so attacking it at a national level is pretty useless.
Posted by: Isab at December 30, 2013 2:31 PM
Well, the answer there is simple Isab - we just limit the number of men who can take the test, and cap male participation at the level of womens interest. Just like we've done with sports in academia.
The WolfMan at December 30, 2013 4:31 PM
Not to bait too much, but it seems that whenever a real-world standard collides with ivory tower ideals, it is the standard that is lowered--at least when it comes to becoming more 'diverse'.
Case in point:
http://www.npr.org/2013/12/27/257363943/marines-most-female-recruits-dont-meet-new-pullup-standard
Regardless of self-policing or standards, there will always be someone to decry them discriminatory or sexist. In the above example of needing a P.E. to sign off on designs, it is only a matter of time before the system is sabotaged with 'diversity'. Maybe we can start creating a new line of positions like a Supervisor P.E. to supervise the P.E.'s...
coffee! at December 30, 2013 6:17 PM
I'm a chick with an Applied Math degree from an engineering school. There were, by far, more men than women at my school, and the discrepancy was even more exaggerated in the higher math courses. But so what? It wasn't a big deal. The profs treated everyone the same, and none of the students cared about the male/female ratio. (Well, not in class, but at the school overall the school ratio was big deal.)
I now have a career in data application architecture and development. Again, women are the minority. With many projects, I'm the only woman, and sometimes the only American, on the technical team. Women are in the majority in the business analysis, project management, and data modeling areas. But for what I do, female applicants are few and far between. It's just the way it is. I don't feel like gender has anything to do with how individuals are treated or evaluated in the workplace.
Some chickies are into the "softer sciences", but not all of us. Why can't we just let folks decide for themselves what career fields to enter into?
In reference to Joe J's comment above, I do like talk about computers and science, but Sci-Fi / DragonCon type stuff is a major turn off. I'm a nerd, not a geek!
KimberBlue at December 30, 2013 7:42 PM
KimberBlue asks: "Some chickies are into the "softer sciences", but not all of us. Why can't we just let folks decide for themselves what career fields to enter into?"
That's what we all wonder...
a_random_guy at December 31, 2013 12:45 AM
KimberBlue, thanks for the input. Ignoring the diversity hires (and I do), I've alwasy found the female engineers I've worked with to be every bit as talented and dedicated as their male counterparts.
Isab: "This exam is also governed by 50 state boards of licensing, examination, and registration so attacking it at a national level is pretty useless. " The problem is that the federal government will have no problem superceding state laws, as they've done in a million other areas (we just had the thread about the pot dispensary in Oakland). The courts won't stop them.
Cousin Dave at December 31, 2013 6:29 AM
"This challenging and exciting field appeals to the feminine propensity to protect and nurture"
that is so sexist...till date, all the big things that have been done to make the world safer, better have been done by men. Any charity at large to the world and society has always been done by men...when women do it today, they never do it for society as a whole, but they do it specifically for women only. And when a group of women go to a restaurant or a bar, they will calculate to the dime what each woman has to pay based on what each has consumed, not one person pay this time and the other person pay the next time the way men do. The chief feminine characteristics are selfishness and a total lack of empathy for anything that is not female. The only exceptions to that are lonely old women who are so emotionally perturbed by their loneliness that they actually get over their natural feminine instinct to actually interact with men without expecting anything in return.
redrajesh at January 1, 2014 12:01 AM
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