Numbers of Women Attempting Degrees in Medicine are Growing

Recent studies reveal that more American women are getting into the medical profession than ever before, a move that could bring drastic changes to the practice as a whole. The percentage of men and women applying for spots in medical school has been about equal for the last few years. As of late, however, more women are applying to medical schools than ever before.

This can be attributed to a couple of things, one being the fact that the feminist movement has changed the way women look at their acceptable career choices. It's not just the medical field that's seeing a large influx of women. Law schools and engineering schools are enjoying many more female applicants than in past years. Not only are women applying for these spots, but the medical schools are being pressured more than ever to accept more women. Antidiscrimination laws have also opened up many traditionally male areas of study, though enforcement of the laws often takes many years and can sometimes be spotty.

Currently there is no information on dropout rates among women attending medical schools. 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. Because there are so many more women in medical school, they want an end to all the discriminatory practices that were once normal everyday.

In order to warm his class up one day, an instructor decided to tell his students a very crude joke. He says "In this list of words, which doesn't belong - an agg, a rug, a woman, or sex" to which he answered, "sex, because you can't beat sex". This doesn't seem like much, and it is quite tame compared to some of the other things women heard in their days as students, but it isn't very professional and makes women look like the lesser sex. However, jokes like this one might be a thing of the past, along with other traditions like slipping in pornographic pictures with presentation slides, or putting pinup photos inside books.

While the humor is demeaning, it is far from the largest issue being faced by female students at medical institutions. There was recently a case where a female medical student was denied the opportunity to finish a physical examination of a male patient because completing the exam required exposing the genitals. But in another room not far away, the woman's husband was allowed to perform an exam on a woman. There was also the interview with admissions in which the interviewer was almost always a man and asked questions about personal life, like plans for marriage and family. 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. There are male interviewers who will twist the answer so that anything the woman says becomes the wrong one. 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 says she's going to have children and stay home, the interviewer claims she lacks commitment to the medical field.

Many people expressed the view that women doctors were more empathatic than their male colleagues. But this is chalked up to being another stereotype of women. One medical student who is a female states to have seen some very insensitive women and likewise some extremely sensitive men in her time, but it was more of a personality trait and less of a biological one.

However, there are those men who believe that woman have amazing things to offer the field of medicine. Little girls are encouraged to be more open, understanding and compassionate than boys, which can be a huge asset for anyone working in the medical field. 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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