I was brought up short while reading Mara H. Wasburn and Susan G. Miller’s description of Purdue University’s struggles to increase the number of women in engineering and technology programs. Their chapter in Women, Gender, and Technology — edited by Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser (University of Illinois Press, 2006) — included a table of female undergraduate enrollment in Purdue’s various schools in 2001. Engineering and technology were at the bottom, with women making up 18 percent and 15 percent, respectively. At the top was veterinary medicine, where 99 percent of the undergraduates were female.
Ninety-nine percent?! Convinced, in my ignorance, that the number must be a misprint, I Googled “women in veterinary medicine” and found that it might not be: Nationwide, women make up 77 percent of doctoral veterinary-medicine students, up from 8 percent in 1969. According to The Chronicle’s 2006 Almanac, in 2004 women earned more than 74 percent of the professional degrees in veterinary medicine, but fewer than 18 percent of the doctorates in engineering. The most recent National Science Foundation numbers on women in engineering and the physical sciences, released in early March, show progress at a snail’s pace since the last report, in 2002.
Why has veterinary medicine been so much more successful than engineering in attracting women?
To be sure, puppies are cuter than microchips, but most of what veterinarians do isn’t about cute. Veterinary medicine, despite its modern high-tech character, remains irreducibly bloody, messy, and often hazardous — especially to pregnant women, because the human fetus is at risk from animal-borne diseases and mutagens. It certainly requires a rigorous scientific education that is at least as difficult and daunting as what engineering demands.
Moreover, despite the apparent stampede of women to the discipline since 1930, when fewer than 1 percent of practicing vets were women, few female role models exist in high-prestige positions: The American Veterinary Medical Association elected its first female president in 1996, and only four of the nation’s 32 veterinary colleges had female deans as of 2006. Most senior faculty members are still male, and men are still the majority among practicing vets, although they have been a minority in veterinary-college classes since the 1986-87 academic year.
No other profession in the United States has experienced as significant a gender shift as veterinary medicine has. The profession’s transformation is not complete, of course. A significant earnings gap persists between men and women, which statistics from the veterinary-medicine association suggest is gradually being reduced as female practitioners gain more years of experience. And women in the field are more likely than men to work part time, which would explain some of the gap.
Structural factors in the profession matter, too. Men remain overrepresented in large-animal and food-supply veterinary medicine — that is, work with big animals, like horses, or animals that produce or become food, including cows and chickens. While large-animal practice, on average, pays better than doctoring small animals, there are far fewer opportunities to work with large animals.
Carin A. Smith pointed out in a 2002 article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association that overall enrollments in veterinary colleges decreased in the early 1980s, before women entered the field in large numbers. The lower enrollments were caused in part by falling incomes in the field as demand for large-animal vets declined. When enrollments began to rise again, most of the increase was from women interested in small-animal practice.
Just as astonishing as the gender shift in veterinary medicine is the fact that we have so little research on why it happened, or on why fields like engineering did not experience similar changes. Even the veterinarians themselves are puzzled, the more so because the shift appears to be entirely spontaneous: There were no organized efforts in veterinary medicine, as there now are in engineering and the sciences, to recruit women.
At Cornell University, for example, we recently received a $3.3-million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a “critical mass” of female faculty members in science and engineering, and the university plans to hire 75 new female professors during the next five years. The idea is that having more women as role models in those fields will make them more appealing to female students. No such inducements seem to have been necessary for women to enter veterinary medicine, however.
Articles in the veterinary literature about the gender shift typically mention one or more of several hypotheses, all of which fail to explain veterinary medicine’s contrast with engineering. The first hypothesis is that women have entered the veterinary profession in unprecedented numbers since the 1960s because they can. Some authors ascribe the influx of women to the removal of obstacles, citing antidiscrimination legislation like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unfortunately for that theory, the same legislation also removed obstacles to women in engineering and the physical sciences, but women remain vastly underrepresented in those fields.
The second hypothesis is that the popular books by James Herriot, like All Creatures Great and Small, are responsible. For example, Lesley Gentry, who wrote about early female students of veterinary medicine at Kansas State University, and who also cited the effect of civil-rights laws, commented in an interview: “The way [Herriot] depicted the life of a veterinarian really attracted women and encouraged them to go seek out what it takes to be a vet.” However, that view raises two obvious questions: Why didn’t Herriot’s work have a similar effect on men, and why did a male role model have so much influence on women? But maybe fields like engineering need more-charismatic ambassadors.
A third hypothesis attempts to explain not the increasing numbers of female students, but the declining numbers of male students, in veterinary colleges: Veterinary medicine is not a way to get rich. In 1994 the mean salary for a man starting work as a veterinarian was $31,260; for a woman, it was $29,875; and both men and women typically had $60,000 to $100,000 in student loans. Yet if low pay and expensive education — to say nothing of the fact that full-time vets, both men and women, typically work about 50 hours a week — have been driving men away recently, why did the same conditions in earlier years not have the same effect?
Could the cause instead be that treating cats and dogs, now more common patients than in the past, is insufficiently macho?
Gender anomalies of this kind — especially contrasts as stunning as that between veterinary medicine and fields like engineering and the physical sciences — demand research that nobody appears to be doing, possibly because no federal agency is offering to support it. In our efforts to bring more women into male-dominated fields, we may have a lot to learn from veterinary medicine. But we won’t learn much until somebody besides the veterinarians starts asking the important questions about what happened in their field.
Rachel Maines is a visiting scholar in science-and-technology studies at Cornell University and author, most recently, of Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 38, Page B9
