tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post1650678760812587249..comments2024-03-03T13:36:10.569-05:00Comments on The Dog Zombie: More on women in veterinary medicineThe Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-14258411174607512522010-12-04T09:27:57.929-05:002010-12-04T09:27:57.929-05:00Thanks so much for this followup, Dr. Lincoln. It&...Thanks so much for this followup, Dr. Lincoln. It's really interesting -- a lot of people seem to assume that women are in vet med because they care less about money than men do, for example, and I didn't know that there was evidence that that wasn't true.The Dog Zombiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-79974791171905986542010-11-28T18:40:05.635-05:002010-11-28T18:40:05.635-05:00Hi - I received a Google alert that you had made a...Hi - I received a Google alert that you had made another post on this topic, so I wanted to follow up. To answer your questions, first, more women have been graduating from college than men since the early 1980s. I'm not fully versed on the research underlying the causes, but understand that men are less likely to graduate from high school and go on to college than women and once there, are more likely to drop out of college. Some start their own businesses, some enter manual labor, etc.<br /><br />As to your second question, veterinary medicine is not the first occupation to feminize. The sex composition of occupations has changed over the years for a variety of reasons. For example, school teaching used to be dominated by men in the late 1800s, but has gradually come to be dominated by women, whereas motion picture screenwriting was first dominated by women in the early 20th century before becoming a male occupation. Women have historically had more restrictions on their labor than have men, so occupations are much more likely to feminize than masculinize.<br /><br />In terms of the time frame for the change, it doesn't happen equally in each occupation due to a process called "occupational jostling" by sociologists. That is, occupations "compete" for qualified entrants, so changes in sex composition are passed along from one occupation to another over time, rather than all at once. Pharmacy feminized before vet med, which is feminizing before medicine and law. I find that for veterinary medicine, most factors typically attributed as causal to feminization, like declining salaries, have similar effects on men AND women. That is, women care about money just as much as men do. The primary drivers of feminization in many fields is larger numbers of female college graduates and male avoidance of the feminizing classroom.<br /><br />Anne Lincoln<br />lincoln@smu.eduAnne E. Lincolnhttp://people.smu.edu/lincolnnoreply@blogger.com