This is gonna be long.*
I've been wondering how much veterinary medicine's current problems--with salaries underperforming student debt, that is--are linked to the huge shift in who is going to school, i.e. classes made up of 80% women. Considering that our society hasn't got its mind wrapped around paying an equal wage to women, that might actually be part of the problem.
My two main sources for facts on this TATUAH (Today's Analytic Topic Unrelated to Actual Homework):
Gender and Veterinary Medicine
Plus this one on why men aren't applying to vet school: Feminization in Veterinary Education
Looking at veterinary medicine, there are problems. Low income makes high expense of school a major problem down the road.
1. Women accept lower pay.
How much of a role does gender discrimination play? How much of a role does gender actually play? It seems like women accept lower salary, which is a problem. They are less driven by financial considerations than career satisfaction based on relationships. I've read a lot of anecdotal references to the fact that women approach work differently than men, but haven't found a legit study to pin it to yet. But I remember financial advice from vet school about not underselling yourself when negotiating a salary. And I remember reading that a living wage for a man tends to assume that he may be supporting a wife and kids, while a living wage for a woman...well, it doesn't assume she's supporting a husband and kids.
Are women less likely to become perfectionist surgeons? Well, I would guess that in general, yes, women are a little better at life balance--and so even when they are doing the same amount of work, it looks a little more relaxed. And they may not push themselves quite so hard at work because they are pushing themselves hard on ALL fronts.
How does this play into professional salaries? Subtly, I would guess.
2. Women are less likely to aim for practice ownership.
Conversely, men may be discarding the profession because they see decreased opportunities for practice ownership. It is difficult to approach this topic without it starting to sound like a blame game, you know "you women are ruining the profession with your lack of incentive" vs. "well, you men are dropping it because all you care about is money."
But if women don't own the practices, then they are not in charge of paychecks for the other veterinarians there.
I was discussing this all with a friend, who wanted to know if men are just more willing to work crazy hours and take lousy jobs that get them better pay down the line. Which is the point at which I want to go dig in the data and start making box-and-whiskers plots.
3. Women take time off for having kids.
This one sucks. Women are penalized in their careers for having kids, but society expects us to revere family and babies. And medicine is the sort of career that is physically and emotionally challenging as it is. Women do not receive any kickback, however, for being more understanding or more well-rounded (that is not supposed to be a pun). Instead, the system pokes them in the eye and says, "well, it's only fair that people who don't take maternity leave at their time of peak productivity get several pay grades higher salary." And then the system pokes them again and says, "But seriously, you are bringing down the professional average."
4. Veterinarians are not MDs
Which is just baffling. I wonder how much this has to do with gender. Doctors these days are both men and women, and as far as I can tell, it is relatively equitable. I think because the people who go into medical school are all recognized to be workaholic psychos. Because there's still relative gender balance, MDs have maintained an even spread. Also, medicine may be changing, but no one is blaming doctors for not wanting to work in rural areas where they might not get paid enough to cover their loans.
Vets, on the other hand. Vets are also workaholic psychos, but the shift to women takes the focus off that. Again, anecdotally (time for a coding exercise! And I don't mean with a defibrillator), I hear complaints that women just want to practice small animal medicine, settle into a cozy practice, and start in on maternity leave. It is true that fewer men are going into veterinary medicine in total. But this may be a case where men are more likely to go into veterinary medicine if they want to practice in large animal medicine, which is going to skew the numbers and make it look like women are eschewing large animal, when in fact that entire field is in significant decline.
5. Women just ain't men. Oh, and a few massive sociologic upheavals that just happen to be right now.
One point to keep in mind, women are outnumbering men in getting college degrees overall, and men who make it through the system without retreating to video games (will-to-power, topic for another day), tend to funnel into fields that provide enough prestige (money, title, or geek cred) to overcome that tendency. freak out when they see the classrooms full of females.
80% of the vet class is female. 4% of the females go into large animal medicine
20% of the vet class is male. 13% of the males go into large animal medicine.
Out of the class, over half of the students going into large animal medicine are female.
And large animal medicine tends to be in rural areas where people cannot pay enough to cover a young doctor's school loans. It may just be that large animal medicine is undergoing its own massive upheaval, namely, the shift to herd health and techs who are more than happy to take over ultrasound and DA surgery in return for a steady job.
6. Maybe it's a good thing?
If veterinarians did not learn the exact same medicine as MDs, this would not be as obnoxious. Vets have a couple of advantages. We can practice on our patients much earlier in the learning process, we have at least a modicum of financial education, and we can start practicing without an additional four years of low-paying residency.
I want to know if women are just less interested in prestige. They are okay with practicing and being good veterinarians, but they're not going to rock the boat over a few grand a year and greater recognition of their medical prowess. Because vet clinics tend to be small and privately owned (or small and franchised, like Banfield) they don't jockey for prestige like hospitals trying to be the biggest and best. Because insurance doesn't obscure the costs, because people don't (can't) put as much money into their animals, there's not the same quantity of money at stake.
In summary, women in veterinary medicine is most likely linked to the pay disparity between this medical profession and every other profession that requires 4 years of maniacal devotion to studying. It is probably multifactorial; women may not be coming into the profession with the financial underpinnings for running a business, which is still a part of veterinary medicine. Lingering gender discrimination hurts the bargaining power of women at the beginning of their careers. Our culture's expectation that professionals establish their careers through long hard hours straight out of school conflicts with societal pressure and biological prudence to have kids around the age of 30. Because there are disproportionately more women in veterinary medicine hitting that stage now, it draws attention to the gender imbalance, and decreases the likelihood of young men seeing themselves as potential veterinarians. Lastly, veterinary medicine has some strengths in terms of practicality that may make it more robust than it currently appears, provided that veterinarians--both men and women--are prepared to apply that practicality to the shifting environment of modern medicine and economics.
*I plan to rewrite this with real stats and examples and stuff, since it was written off the cuff.
