Latest MD class sees women exceed men as enrollees

Article here. Excerpt:

'For the first time, more women than men enrolled in U.S. medical schools in 2017, according to data from The Association of American Medical Colleges. The AAMC says 50.7 percent of first-year medical students are women this year.

“This year’s matriculating class demonstrates that medicine is an increasingly attractive career for women and that medical schools are creating an inclusive environment,” Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., AAMC president and CEO said in a statement. “While we have much more work to do to attain broader diversity among our students, faculty, and leadership, this is a notable milestone.”

The association says the number of female medical students has grown by 9.6 percent since 2015. In that same time, the percentage of male students has declined by 2.3 percent, the AAMC says.'

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All this time I thought women med students outnumbered men starting years back. Maybe I had that confused with lawyers.

On a related note, the vast, vast majority of refuse collectors, smoke-jumpers and fire-fighters in general, ordnance disposal technicians, SWAT team members, nuclear waste and fuel handlers, and lion-tamers remain men. Though I do hear some progress has been made for women on the lion-tamer front recently.

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I, too, thought that had happened some time ago. At any rate, reading this makes me wonder what the implications are. I've heard that women in medicine gravitate toward specialisms that are not as demanding in terms of time and training, that few of them become, say, heart surgeons. And it will be interesting to see what effect greater numbers of women will have on the status accorded to the medical profession. In the old Soviet Union, the majority of doctors were women (I don't know whether or not that's still the case in Russia), but in the Soviet Union, doctors didn't have very high social status compared to the US. And it used to be the case anywhere that occupations dominated by women were of lower status. Whether or not that will be true from now on remains to be seen, but when I see men in my classes goofing off, I want to shake them and say "Get with it guys! They're walking all over us!"

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Many men in a line of work doesn't automagically confer higher status on it. Garbage collecting is considered a low status occupation but is made up if not exclusively by men then almost so.

The degree of trust plus the perceived nobility of pursuit added to higher compensation generally determines the status of a profession, not the sex of the typical worker.

But as the Zen master once said, 'tis not the work that ennobles the worker, 'tis the worker who ennobles the work. As a further example, consider lawyers. Lawyering is traditionally "male dominated" but gets a bad rap due to the ambulance-chasers and other mercenary types among them. So good lawyers end up getting tar-brushed along with the scuzzballs.

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Of course there are many low status occupations dominated by men. That's obvious. The feminocracy has been only too happy to leave "glass cellar" occupations to men, and you'll never hear them complain about too few female garbage collectors. But that does not negate the fact that occupations (and I'm thinking mainly of "professional" or white collar occupations) dominated by women have, in large part, tended in the past to have less status than those dominated by men. I was merely musing on whether or not this would be true in the future.

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