Are Women Taking Over Veterinary Medicine?

It’s not often I have a guy submit an interesting tidbit like this, but Pete, a fourth year vet student in Utrecht, The Netherlands wrote to tell me:

“Do you know that in our university, over 80% of the vet students are girls? We admit 225 new students each year, times six years, times eighty percent, means that I and roughly 200 other guy vet students share my green scrubs with over a thousand soon-to-be-girl-veterinarians.”

Peter went on to translate a headline from a Dutch newspaper, printed in 2005 which reads “At the veterinary faculty three quarters of the students is female”.

Wow – That’s pretty encouraging for women in the Netherlands! I don’t know the exact ratios here in the US, but when my sister graduated from the U of I last year I noticed that it was almost a 50/50 split between men and women getting their DVM degree.

Of the photo posted, Peter explains “The picture I sent you is taken with my mobile phone, so the quality is really lousy. But it depicts quite accurately what I ‘have to deal with’ every day: being the only guy in a whole room full of female students. Some guys have all the luck, eh? ;-) By the way, the dog was not harmed, we had to take a tiny amount of blood to determine its hematocrit (=the percentage of red blood cells).”

Thanks for the information, Peter.  :)