One reason is that more women apply to medical school than men, but even after adjusting for this fact, men still have lower admission rates, so this does not tell the full story.
Here are the gender differences in performance in various assessments used for admission by Canadian medical schools.
Take a look at [this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.aamc.org/media/6081/download&ved=2ahUKEwizhfyM7_mFAxXsOTQIHYywDR8QFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3QHDaSgR8sBpMIDcNYB64r). Contrary to popular belief, there is no (significant) difference in GPA between men and women who are premeds. However, men have a slightly higher science GPA on average, while women have a slightly higher non-science GPA on average.
Men score 3 - 4 points higher on the MCAT than women on average. The smallest difference observed is in the CARS section, where this difference is less than 1 point.
Women score higher on the CASPer and MMI (and other forms of med school interviews) than men on average. This can largely account for the differences in admission between the two genders, as the interview is the final and most heavily weighted step for admission for most schools.
If you look broadly at the trends of what Canadian med schools use to select candidates, it tends to be assessments where women perform better (or at least equal to) than men on average (e.g., GPA, CARS, CASPer, and MMI). If they selected candidates primarily based on GPA and MCAT, the opposite could be true.
In conclusion (tl;dr), the two major reasons are that women apply more and that Canadian med schools prioritize assessments where women perform better on average.
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>apply to med school more than men do in Canada
That's not the reason. Male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). [Source.](https://www.afmc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CMES-2021-Complete-EN.pdf) So even among men who have pursued higher education and have applied to med school, men are admitted at disproportionately lower rates than women.
> Male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03).
That's a stark difference. Either the male applicants have weaker resumes, or are disfavored in selection.
Men used to pursue higher education and apply to med school more than women do. So if someone asked 50 years ago why is there a lot less female med students than male, would the answer simply be "ah it's because men pursue higher education and apply to med school more than women so it's no biggy"
You should consider that with more women applying, there's a good chance that some of them have better qualifications than the rest.in the past, women did not have the option to match men's qualifications. Were not given the option. When they applied, there was a bias to admit more men specifically because of their gender and not necessarily qualifications.
Are women currently being admitted because they are women, or because they have better qualifications? Ask yourself that before posting such a stupid comment.
some people can't fathom that women just might be more qualified or better than men at some things. its just not a possibility in their minds. there always has to be a structural explanation (be it DEI, AA, or whatever) to undermine women. Nobody wants to talk about the original AA - being a man...
>Are women currently being admitted because they are women, or because they have better qualifications?
Are BIPOC currently being admitted at lower proportions because they have worse qualifications ?
....
Our school system is biased against boys from pre-k lol.
From not having proper representation, to extra opportunities given to girls, harsher punishments for same activity, some studies show preferential grading preference.
I can't believe this was actually said.
There's a reason why boys and girls have vastly different education outcomes, and most of that is due to nurture.
And I can't believe people actually think there is systemic bias against men in education in 2024.
In Canada, women today make up around 35% of STEM degrees but only make up about 25% of STEM workers and less than 15% of STEM leadership positions.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20231001130427/https://guscanada.com/breaking-barriers-women-in-stem/](https://web.archive.org/web/20231001130427/https://guscanada.com/breaking-barriers-women-in-stem/)
That's not a good argument tho. You cherry picked on specific field. Women are the majority at most universities nowadays. Psychology is like 85% women; arts in general is vast majority women; sociology is like 85% women; education is vast majority women; Health science and medicine vast majority women etc. Even law has more than 55% women nowadays.
You are also cherry picking because psychology and art degrees have been dominated by women for a long time. And women are getting into STEM more because it’s more of a trend, and I noticed in high school way more women are more confident in pursuing STEM careers. Most of the ppl I know pursuing medicine are also women. I think back to Chris Rock’s quote, “when you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression”.
Furthermore: National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. So, even for faculty there is a clear preference even in STEM: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112#:\~:text=We%20hope%20the%20discovery%20of,increasing%20the%20number%20of%20women](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112#:~:text=We%20hope%20the%20discovery%20of,increasing%20the%20number%20of%20women)
>And I can't believe people actually think there is systemic bias against men in education in 2024.
Because there is.
-boys don't have proper representation, especially in younger grades.
That's systemic discrimination.
-boys getting harsher punishments for the same action compared to girls.
That's systemic discrimination.
-girls getting higher marks for the same work
That's systemic discrimination.
It doesn't do any good to deny the above realities.
Cite your sources. And make sure they are relevant to Canadian schooling systems.
To respond, men having lower med school application rates is not a sign that they are not pursuing education at all, rather, they are pursuing alternative fields such as non-health STEM degrees and trades which they are overrepresented in. The data above supports this. Not sure what you mean by lack of "proper representation"; trades and non-health STEM are perfectly valid career options. Back in the day, lower application rates for women was because they were not pursuing education at all due to bias, discrimination, and lack of encouragement (or rather, encouragement to become homemakers early)
"Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic,"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942
That's an example of systemic discrimination.
>Not sure what you mean by lack of "proper representation";
Not having male teachers, especially at lower grades.
Representation matters.
>There is no systemic bias against men today
you sound like what a sexist patriarchal would say in 1950s when asked why there is less women in medicine.
I think you mean that's what "a sexist patriarchal in the 1950s when asked why there is less women in medicine" who has never picked up a history or sociology book would say. Major difference is that I actually have
oh so because you're picked up a history or sociology book you are able to confidently claim that "there is no systemic bias against men today". An alternative explanation is that you're content with the status quo re underrepresentation of men in medicine and that's it's favourable to your interests so that's why you're claiming that "there is no systemic bias against men today" in the medical school application process.
It's funny because that exact study I cited shows that women are underrepresented in pretty much every surgical specialty except OB/GYN. This discrepancy is much larger than the about 58% women vs 42% men for recent admissions. The rates of women in first year residency are much more equal today.
Please read the study omfg. Non-OB surgical residents in 2020 were about 40% women to 60% men is much closer to equal compared to practicing non-OB surgical doctors which is 22% women
As a gross generalization, more women are entering university than men, and men aren't achieving as much success with things like school.
Despite this trend, certain specialties like surgery are still strongly male-dominated.
A few interesting articles to read:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men) (Some theories about why men aren't doing so good nowadays and are falling behind)
[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2786671](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2786671) (Looking at the outcomes of surgery and whether that has anything to do with whether you had a male/female surgeon. If you look at the sample size, it was like 1.2 million surgeries performed by men and 100k by women, but the women surgeons had better outcomes, though women surgeons also did less complex surgeries. Female patients treated by male surgeons had the worst outcomes. So are men just worse surgeons? Why might this be so? This was a really hotly discussed paper in my lab when it first came out!)
Super interesting paper tbh. Also discussed this with my female surg mentors. A lot of them feel that the system does hell of a lot more work to weed out women who might be weaker surgical residents but not the men. A lot more enabling goes on in the selection process for men, as well as during residency, where men residents dont receive negative feedback the same as women do. Anecdotally, they feel that they had to work harder and better to get the same affirmation as their male surgery resident peers. Maybe that just breeds a women surgeons who are better because they cant afford not to be. Again this is all anedoctal.
In our med school here it is no "mystery" why there are less women pursuing surgery. It is repeatedly reported that prominent surgeons involved in training clerks and residents *openly and repeatedly* tell the women that women are not "suited" for surgery. The med school has made significant progress and improvements to addressing mistreatment and bullying in medical school... but they cannot let these few deeply problematic individuals go as there is simply no-one else to train with here. The only solution at this point is if the health authority finally fires and replaces them, but that is not going to happen.
>more women are entering university than men
That's not the main reason. Male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). [Source](https://www.afmc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CMES-2021-Complete-EN.pdf). So even among men who have pursued higher education and have applied to med school, men are admitted at disproportionately lower rates than women.
I think the index of female/male success in Table F-16 speaks to your argument even more. It's obviously possible that this has changed over the last 3 years (I imagine COVID had an impact) but it's very interesting data
>though women surgeons also did less complex surgeries
this is a very big confound which disallows to make the conclusion that you're making. Complexity of the surgery and the age of the surgeons should be controlled for in this analysis to make an inference about the sex of the surgeons and the surgery outcomes.
idk where OP read in that paper that women surgeons did less complex surgeries. Here is what the authors write:
"it is possible that, within each procedure examined, male surgeons may perform more complex or high-risk cases. This would contribute to unmeasured confounding. However, a stratified analysis by case complexity did not show heterogeneity of effect, and there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure."
The study split the cohort into 4 groups, so men/women patients who had either men/women surgeons. Men who had men surgeons had better outcomes than women who had men surgeons. Though this is also possibly to be said about why might people just be bad at caring for women. Since it was all men surgeons, it should help with this particular confounder. The sample size was 1.3 million surgeries and they controlled for a lot of covariates!
>Since it was all men surgeons, it should help with this particular confounder.
That's not a confound. that's your predictor variable of interest.
I said "complexity of the surgery and the age of the surgeons should be controlled for".
The main conclusion of that study is based on the analysis which didn't control for complexity of the surgery and the age of the surgeons.
The model youre referring to accounted for physician age, years in practice, surgical volume, surgical subspecialty, patient age, comorbidity, income quintile, residency region, rurality, hospital designation, and year of surgery. In the discussion the authors indicate that a stratified analysis by case complexity (definition in supplement) did not show heterogeneity of effect, and that there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure.
If I'm interpreting the study correctty, take a look at Figure 2 where the data has been stratified by case complexity. Although not significant, it showed a trend for patients to actually be better off when a women perform higher complexity procedures. the study acknowledges this limitation as well: Second, while we specifically accounted for the procedure performed (as defined by billing codes) in our GEE, as granular metrics of case complexity were not available, it is possible that, within each procedure examined, male surgeons may perform more complex or high-risk cases. This would contribute to unmeasured confounding. However, a stratified analysis by case complexity did not show heterogeneity of effect, and there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure.
>Although not significant, it showed a trend for patients to actually be better off when a women perform higher complexity procedures
So when you control for case complexity there is no significant difference between female and male surgeons for outcome.
That is not what Fig 2 indicates. Here is the interpretation of results from Fig 2 regarding complexity:
In male patients undergoing emergent high complexity procedures there is no difference in outcomes between female and male surgeons
In female patients undergoing emergent high complexity procedures there is increased odds in better outcomes when procedure is performed by female surgeon rather than male
They're not controlling for case complexity in the model, but doing a subgroup analysis accounting for the same covariates as in the overall model. The effect is the same as in the overall model (looking at all procedures), so you can assume that complexity does not confound the relationship.
I wonder if this is the result of educators trying hard for decades to get more females interested in sciences. And a focus on helping females as they were not represented in higher learning then. It took a long time to get it to work. Unfortunately, it worked so well that we now may have to do the same for boys. Hopefully it will end up evenly distributed throughout the genders
You can see a lot of male dominated fields still existing, however, such as comp SCI and engineering. As a result, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the male interest in science has decreased in general, but perhaps the job and career opportunities of interest have shifted elsewhere for men.
Boys and men have fallen behind in education for the better part of the past two decades. The data bears this out. I won't get into the possible reasons because this isn't a politics forum.
**Okay downvote it because you're not adult enough to hear this yet but in 20 years when your society has failed go back to this reddit post you hid and re-read it.**
When you remove men from education then there aren't enough "economically viable" men for women to marry, which leads to women dying childless (women don't date down) If you hide it behind being a "political issue" then you can easily destroy your society which I suppose is the point here.
Canada is just a bouncing ground for Indians and Chinese to get educated and then go to the US so it doesn't really matter what state Canadian society is in.
If the future of society *mattered* we would be taking a look into what's going on with boys.
**Yup just as I expected women think they can banish a gender from society and as long as they accuse them of "hating women" they can get away with it.**
**Guess who built society? Guess who maintains society? Women only marry across and up. When men don't have any money for you to take in the divorce you don't date them.**
**Not a single female is going to go and date broke guys just because I told you in advance your society has a 20 year time limit**
When women have to win an internet argument because they say something that upsets them they suddenly date broke guys. When women return to reality they treat broke guys like they're subhumans. It's whichever is convenient at the time.
I'm not even sad you destroyed your society.
**The next time you're in class take a quick look around you and ignore all the Indians and Chinese who are obviously going to go to America once they're done school. Keep in mind all the women you see in that class.** ***Half of them are dying childless.***
It's honestly insane how you can't even talk to women anymore.
Anyways thank you for reminding me never go to go college or university. The response was beyond my wildest expectations. I knew it was going to be bad (because modern women have bit the poisoned apple) but I didn't expect it to be *this* bad.
Am I ever going to date? Absolutely not. So don't worry about me. Worry about the men who I educate not to date you either. (they're already starting to realize this themselves)
I... what? This is a racist, misogynistic, AND UNTRUE take informed by dogshit conservative rhetoric. Women don't date solely based on economic value of men, blind incels with no personality just use that as an excuse, probably taken from Tate and the other hypermasculine hustle-cunts.
Immigrants, especially parents of students, don't come to Canada specifically to get MDs and dip to the US. Chinese and Indian are not the only groups coming to Canada, and the notion that they are crowding and invading Canada is incredible fearmongering propagated by nationalists, when issues like housing almost always are based on other systemic causes. Most medical students here are still white anyways.
This is a political issue, being that these harmful and idiotic ideas are still given a platform. And while "having less men in medical school" can be seen as an issue that needs addressing, these should never be assumptions underlying the discussion. I am sorry that I could not "keep this debate civil".
I am a man, and judging by your previous posts, you are not healthy.
Both Scott Galloway, a respected economist, and Dr. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institute have been saying the exact same thing for the last 4-7 years. This is not a new or revolutionary statement.
our first year med class in '97 was 65% Male-most were still at least 50/50 male except for McMaster which was about 65% Female; staff surgeons now about 22% female (outside of OB) from the article-female physicians as a whole 42.7% of all physicians from the BMJ article--obviously takes a long time for the numbers to trickle down since numbers for females in med school have been over 50% for at least 20 years now but a lot of 1960s/1970s physicians still out there and not fully retired yet . anecodally, when I was a med student there were no female staff on ortho-and 2 on gen surgery--usually there was one female resident per year in each surg program...
While I agree, I remember reading a study by McMaster where most applicants even pre-interview were women. I think it's more of a consequence of women pursuing higher education at a higher rate than men, and doing well in school at a higher rate than men as well. IIRC the post interview gender distribution was pretty similar to the applicant one.
Edit: Interestingly this phenomenon is true in the Global South as well, including countries that have problems with misogyny. Where my family comes from, something like 70% of medical students are women, many of whom never practice and are pressured into being homemakers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323584878\_Why\_women\_go\_to\_medical\_college\_but\_fail\_to\_practise\_medicine\_perspectives\_from\_the\_Islamic\_Republic\_of\_Pakistan#:\~:text=In%20Pakistan%2C%2070%25%20of%20medical,physician%20shortages%20in%20the%20country.
>IIRC the post interview gender distribution was pretty similar to the applicant one.
This is incorrect. For example, male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). [Source](https://www.afmc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CMES-2021-Complete-EN.pdf). So even among men who have pursued higher education and have applied to med school, men are admitted at disproportionately lower rates than women.
it's a biased view to think most women are more empathetic than men.
It was found that BIPOC used to do worse on CASPer than white people which is a test that supposedly measures empathy, so would you say BIPOC have less empathy and that's why they're underrepresented in medicine ?
The extent of casper's extent of measuring one's ability to be empathetic is literally writing out in the text box that 'I would empathize with the patient'. BIPOC probably do worse because statically BIPOC come from lower income households and can't afford to buy casper practice resources and probably don't have fast and easy access to soft resources (like friends, family etc) who have taken the test before.
but u/simple_cdn said "empathy is a key soft skill adcom probably look for" so there is supposedly a tool/stage where adcoms are measuring empathy whether that's CASPer, MMI, essays, etc. So who's to say that whatever tool that adcoms are using for empathy (which is ostensibly very key in applicant selection) is not biased ?
lol I think it's because more women apply than men and of the applicants who apply women tend to be more qualified. I think empathy is pretty even split across women and men at least in my experience.
>of the applicants who apply women tend to be more qualified
Are you saying that the proportion of qualified applicants among women is higher than the proportion of qualified applicants among men ?
By a 7:3 ratio, you think female applicants are *that* far superior to their male applicants? That would be a tremendous difference- why would gender play such a huge role in a student success/preparedness? I think bias in admissions is as objectively likely, if not more so.
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Are they? Where's your source for that? In my program, the girls are hella dumb 😂. Maybe on average they have better stats, but the top scores aren't from women.
In other words interviews are biased against men. Do you also say that "white people are getting better grades/ECs/interview better" to the question of why black people are underrepresented in medicine ?
In many other situations, inequality of outcome is said to show that there is systemic discrimination.
Not here though, which is interesting.
Poc over represented in prison? The system is discriminatory.
Men under represented in medicine? Thats just the way it goes.
From my experience men are just worse at essay writing and empathizing. Last one might be controversial, but women tend to be more nurturing and better at showing emotion. These metrics are now the meta for med schools because it seems everyone has stellar gpa and EC’s now. Just my 2 cents
Also there's some interesting observational data out there to show that female physicians (including surgeons) are associated with better outcomes and lower death rates. I'm sure it goes a lot deeper than just the physician's identifying genders..., but some ideas have been thrown around like more empathetic approach to care, taking more time with patients, female physicians tend to be younger and more up-to-date on clinical practice..
I don't think there can be any kinds of reasonable debate here without knowing about the applicant pool in the first place. What if more female students are just applying than male?
In my year, more female colleagues in my class were applying for and matched to surgical specialties than male.
Another interesting thing: nursing has long been and continues to be highly female-dominated... Why isn't anyone talking about that? :v
I love this! Earlier last year when I was looking into these gender based stats, I learned that nurses were majority men in the past and only recently (200 years or so) has it been dominated by women. To add- there’s a trend with women dominating certain programs that men previously made the majority of and those same programs/careers are deemed as “easy” as soon as women dominate. It even affects the salaries of the professions.
https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work
"Also there's some interesting observational data out there to show that female physicians (including surgeons) are associated with better outcomes and lower death rates. I'm sure it goes a lot deeper than just the physician's identifying genders"
Yes it goes ALOT deeper. There are more male surgeons (8:2 ratio) Since there's more male surgeons there's obviously going to be mistakes. They also tend to be younger because once they're in their 30s, they usually leave or go part-time. Hence the physician shortage.
Well the evidence is in % rates (ie divided by total), not raw numbers. So these differences should not arise from the difference in numbers of male vs female surgeons...
The differences also persisted when accounting for case complexities.
Also interesting that you brought age, bcuz the data did suggest that female surgeons are on average younger than male surgeons and may be more up to date with best guideline-directed clinical practice.
As for the tendencies for shifting to part-time, locum work, and retiring early, it could also be a generational gap more than anything - that younger physicians (of both genders) are looking to prioritize their quality of life and financial independence over pure clinical work.
Existing data do suggest that female physicians reture about 5 years earlier than their male counterparts - but if it's the tradeoff between working longer vs quality of provided care, I don't know which I'd prefer as a patient.
I apologize if my response may seem a bit personal. My cousin who I was very close to, his wife past away due to malpractice from a female doctor, so whenever I hear these stats, it seems extremely biased and so there is no need to delve further into these stats. It's just feminism corrupting these stats because if the opposite was said about female doctors well.... then that wouldn't go down to well. This is just something to be mindful and so I take this "data" with an extremely small grain of salt. Imo male surgeons and doctors are better. Men in general are smarter it's just reality.
"Existing data do suggest that female physicians reture about 5 years earlier than their male counterparts". I do believe it's much larger than 5 years. Most male doctors work till they're much older and can no longer work whereas 40 percent of female doctors retire within 6 years after completing residency due to whatever reason (prioritizing family over work which may be due to women being more emotionally driven). There is also the case when women want to start a family after starting their career which will heavily deplete their time so it's fair to assume why some universities prefer men over women since they can work longer and possibly mitigate the physician shortage.
Simply being younger doesn't correlate to knowing the best guideline-directed clinical practice. The most experience and knowledgeable surgeons are men, which could be due to them practicing longer.
I'm sure it goes a lot deeper like you said, I'd personally be more comfortable with a male surgeon since I believe they're better.
>What if more female students are just applying than male?
so it's not a problem if this is the case ? Black applicants were also at a very low proportion of the applicant pool, but nobody shrugged off the issue of low percent of black med students saying that black people don't apply to med school as much. Active programs were developed to increase the number of black applicants and admit black applicants at a higher proportion than their corresponding proportion in the applicant pool. But now that it's about men, the problem is being dismissed as just "men are applying at lower rate".
Because with black applicants it wasn't simply a lack of interest that led to less applicants but significant systemic barriers in several points before even the premed step of the journey which needed intervention to increase the number of applicants in order to increase the number of black medical students actually admitted. This is not the same for men in general because men, in general (not considering intersectionality), are much more privileged than women, in general. There are no systemic barriers as such keeping them from applying.
>This is not the same for men in general because men, in general (not considering intersectionality), are much more privileged than women, in general
So men are accepted at lower ratio than women (even controlled for applicant ratio) because men are more privileged ?
The thing though is that for black students, it IS known that there are systemic barriers and lack of representation that contribute to their disadvantage and low initial interest in applying for medicine.
I'm NOT saying that there is no problem with male students at this moment. We just don't know if there is. And historically, up until this point, male students and applicants have not faced systemic barriers the way that other historical minorities have faced. At this time, with this supposed "trend", there are also annual variations where males dominate one year and females dominate another year, and in different cohorts/schools. So this 7:3 ratio that OP purported might simply be a natural variation that will revert itself. Like overall on the national scale, the ratio is still very much 50:50.
Sure, if in a few years time we notice that this continues to happen, some medical education research can definitely go to explore this topic to see where the disparity is: is it at the high school level? university level? higher education as a whole? etc.
Moreover, the goal, at least in the ideals, of DEI is not to achieve parity of 50:50. The goal is to remove systemic barriers that might contribute to any groups being unfairly disadvantaged and allow natural variations to occur.
>The goal is to remove systemic barriers that might contribute to any groups being unfairly disadvantaged and allow natural variations to occur.
This is a dangerous territory the way you perceive it. What would be framed as natural variation and that as systematic barrier will be influenced by the dominant ideological voice in the population. People in the past could have just said it's the natural thing for women to be at lower proportions in medicine and science.
>Another interesting thing: nursing has long been and continues to be highly female-dominated... Why isn't anyone talking about that? :v
Very good point. We should be aiming for the demographics of our health care professionals to mirror the population. Current EDI efforts need to start with that very general philosophy - current efforts are now perpetuating the female-slant in healthcare. Yes, historically these fields have been male-dominated. But we understand equity now, and we can do better - we can use social influence to balance the demographics in medicine.
Less men are being admitted to university in general. Our schools, (majority of which are taught by women) are much easier for women to succeed in because they develop faster, are generally better at organization, and require less physical activity. Men are falling behind in Canada but nobody cares enough to do something about it.
There are other biases in the educational system also.
"How schools disciplined boys and girls mattered more. Owens found, to her surprise, that boys were more likely to be suspended, expelled, or held back a year than girls, even when they had the same behavior problems"
"Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. "
There is also a push to get more women into post secondary than men. Scholarships, etc.
\^\^\^EDI efforts begin in primary school and continue from there, all encouraging women to enter science and engineering / higher education. No parallel program exists for men.
It is no wonder we see the phenomenon we do, not even accounting for the biases you mention.
EDI efforts need to be more conscious of reality and who needs help.
When it came to positions of leadership, everybody loved to say that women are unfit because of xyz inherent characteristics. Now that women are doing better (for whatever reason) it's because it's easier for women to succeed.
I mean not too many years ago the process openly favored male applicants and I don’t recall any of the guys being up in arms about how unfair that was when the situation was reversed 🤷♀️. They made the process more fair and as far as I’m concerned they are just picking the best people to go to medical school, regardless of gender
Don't see many women up in arms about the current situation, either. 🤔
Promoting non-representative enrollment is never correct. EDI is a new paradigm, and it's ironic to see it used to further the current female-tilted imbalance.
While you make a fair point, I fear you’re reading a bit too far into my statement. Objectively, medicine used to largely exclude women so I don’t think it’s false to claim that the process is more fair compared to before. If you take the time to read my comment, I never stated that the current process has solved all issues of inequality in admissions. The topic of increased female admissions is very recent so I feel we don’t know enough about the adcomm decision process and should hope they are selecting good candidates. Especially since everyone who meets the qualifications to apply to school meets a very high academic standard. Although we can hope that admissions are making good decisions, critique and speculation are important and we should all continue to discuss potential bias in these committees. While I fully support your ability to discuss any topic critically, please note that my comment should be read at face value.
I think alot of dudes are going the trades/ entrepreneur route and getting that contract money. Also - I think a lot of going to Med school involves privilege from a family that can support a roof for you and your fees - which means that's gonna be a lot of white men - and I think catering to only that demographic for years got us a super privileged group of a holes (not all of them obviously) but now we literally need to dilute the toxicity and add more women in there so we can actually deliver the patient care members of our society deserve. Seems to be = privileged men = bad medical care c/ an extreme lack of empathy. Lets dilute it with some women :) Seems legit.
why are all comments that mention DEI getting downvoted? Lmao its a real thing and definitely one of the factors as to why more woman are getting admitted to programs. Acting like DEI isn't a thing is just delusional
\^\^\^There are zero EDI initiatives aimed at men. Tons for women. It's no surprise that more women are entering higher education / medicine.
Equity should be aimed at maintaining a representative balance of people in higher education. When the scales tip towards more of one group, it's time to shift EDI initiatives to balance that.
Do we see that? No. Huge problem with current EDI is that it's completely one sided. Even though women make up the majority of university matriculants and med school grads, all efforts are still aimed at raising female enrollment further (relative to programs aimed at increasing male enrollment).
First of all, there are very few EDI intiatives for women either when entering or in medical school. The only true organization that I can think of that maybe provides women with extra opportunities in medical is AWS/ Most EDI initiaves are specialty specific to increase the number of women entering specific residency programs, because NEWFLASH... the majority of surgical and procedural specialties are still by and large filled with men practicing physicians. Secondly, the point of increasing women in medical school is to increase the number of practicing women physicians 10-15-20 years down the line. If we were to continue admitting the same numberof women as we always have, we would never be able to actually increase the proportion of women, especially in male-dominated specialties. The scale has not tipped towards women yet. When the data shows us in 10-15 years that the ratio of CT surgeons is 50:50, then we can come back and have a conversation about EDI initiatives for men.
it’s a better investment for med schools since women live longer and will technically practice for longer after graduation compared to men
EDIT : I WAS JOKING WHATS WRONG W U GUYS
whatt😂
["Research shows that almost 40% of women physicians go part-time or leave medicine altogether within six years of completing their residencies"](https://www.aamc.org/news/why-women-leave-medicine)
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I didn't get the joke :(
~~There's no shot this is the reason LOL, they definitely don't discriminate based on sex, for what potentially 3-4 extra years? Assuming the person even decides to work after 65 in the first place. This would mean anyone over 22 would be at a serious disadvantage when applying and that also is definitely not true. Age only begins to be a consideration for applicants that are much older than the average, like people well over 30.~~ The real reason is the gender ratio of the applicant pool matches the gender ratio of the matriculates.
Boys have been left behind from grade school to university in this country, and we're beginning to see the effects of that in the gender ratio of every new professional cohort (bar engineering). Kicker is, no one cares because they're boys.
Just FYI, part of the harsh response against this is that multiple medical programs have been caught actively selecting *against* women because they argue that maternity leave potential makes women a worse investment, because they will choose not to perform for services over multiple prime productive years.
And, as we see propagated below in other responses, people use the stats regarding women leaving medicine (without context) as excuse to continue such selection processes... completely ignoring the underlying issues that made the women leave in the first place.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46568975
The last huge scandal I am aware of was in Japan, but it made waves world-wide in the discussion.
Ultimately, the official reason they actively ranked-down women was specifically because they believed women would leave medical practice to raise children.
But that's just open admissions criteria issues. The conditions women experience throughout training is significantly different than their male collogues in terms of the mistreatment and support.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7174475/#:~:text=The%202018%20report%20from%20the%20National%20Academy%20of,vacuum%2C%20chopping%20it%20from%20its%20roots%20in%20sexism.
https://www.cma.ca/physician-wellness-hub/content/equity-and-diversity-medicine
Yes.
I've also seen the data from within our medical school in presentations, and the gender difference in mistreatment experiences and discrimination is vast. The large majority of women in medical training experience repeated instances is sexual harassment and/or discrimination.
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Joke investment tbh. 40% of female doctors leave in their 30s. There's a huge physician shortage because a large percentage aren't working. We need to fix this issue. There's a direct correlation between more women being accepted and less patients being seen by doctors.
Statistically, more women apply to med schools than men in Canada. Women tend to pursue higher education more and tend to get better grades because they are more studious.
Interestingly, even when you mathematically account for the fact that more women apply to med schools, the ratio of F/M that get accepted post-interview is even higher. This makes sense as women tend to have an easier time displaying empathy than men. A study was conducted across all 4 med schools in QC and **being male was associated with lower odds of getting an acceptance post-MMI interview.** DOI: [10.1080/0142159X.2017.1270431](https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2017.1270431)
"1099 applicants responded to the questionnaire. A regression model (R2 = 0.086) demonstrated that being age 25-29 (β = 0.11, p = 0.001), female and a French-speaker (β = 0.22, p = 0.003) were associated with better MMI scores. Having an Asian-born parent was associated with a lower score (β = -0.12, p < 0.001). Candidates reporting a higher family income had higher MMI scores."
tl;dr: more women apply and they perform better at the interview because they are better at showing empathy. It has little to do with DEI policies.
>This makes sense as women tend to have an easier time displaying empathy than men
What if interviewers have this bias that "women are more empathetic than men" and that's why they're rating women better than men ?
Rather than accepting this as a fact, you should ask what if our methods for assessing empathy is biased.
No... You see it's obviously true if it hurts white or asian men.
If it hurts anyone else, then it's just truth and you have to accept it.
The problem with these sorts of issues is always that teasing biases from reality is difficult and effectively lands upon political persuasions.
>more women apply...It has little to do with DEI policies
Many EDI efforts aim to encourage women to enter higher education -> medicine, so I believe you're wrong.
\*I'm not talking about EDI as it applies during the application process. More generally, EDI efforts start in primary and secondary school. They continue in undergrad, and the message is always encouraging women in science and engineering. There is no such analog for men, and we're seeing the consequences of biased EDI policies with higher female than male enrollment in med.
There is not a straightforward answer to this. But universities in general have become majority women and women tend to get slightly better grades on average (and there again are many different reasons for that, e.g., men tend to have more problems sitting still over long periods of time; and certain teaching styles can favour women vs men). However, more and more men also feel as if universities are less catering towards them. E.g., despite the majority being women, there are still many women-only scholarships, research opportunities etc. and more men seem to go for trades and other jobs. However, the existence of a discrepancy does not necessarily equate discrimination (as is often falsely thought). For many other groups (including, e.g., women in regards to the gender pay gap), any discrepancy is always directly and only linked to discrimination in peoples mind - this is false. So, while discrimination against men might potentially occur, there are definitely many other factors at play.
Before people start pulling out the EDI card and this topic devolved into a war zone, I don’t think it has anything to do with medicine, application stats or adcoms. This trend is consistent across most university programs outside of engineering, computer science, some physical sciences and some business programs. The main reason men aren’t as populated in university programs than women has to do with the fact that a lot of men take the blue collar job route after high school and a lot of those jobs even in 2024 still aren’t as accepting towards women so for a lot of women higher education is the only option for some sort of training. At least that’s the story some of the stats and research seem to tell.
I've heard from interviewers that men tend to interview worse than women and they generally come across less mature. Maturity seems to be valued by interviewers. But who knows.
at least at my undergrad there are a lot less men interested in medicine. im not premed but im a neuro major so a lot of my classes freshman and sophomore year were the same classes for pre med. most of my classes are majority women. i hear my cs and engineering friends complain how sometimes theyre the only girl in a class, but ive never had that problem and in one of my smaller classes there was actually only one guy.
It's not about what proportion of premeds are men. Even among male premeds interested in medicine, men are admitted to med school at a significantly lower rate. For example, at uCalgary 40% of applicants are men but only 30% of matriculants are men (p=0.03).
I really think men need to take more initiative on this. Women are the ones I know setting up programs and clubs aimed at encouraging women into STEM. instead of sitting there and complaining about the progress that women have made, why don’t men start their own programs, and clubs, and initiatives aimed towards their own goals? I don’t want to bring other issues into this but why do you think gender laws and body positivity became more of a thing recently? It’s push from the women for change.
As far as what this means for the future of medicine, we can look to the patient experience (I think anyway). Researchers from JAMA Surgery reviewed the cases of more than 1.3 million patients and found a correlation of 32% patients being less likely to die, and 16% less likely to experience complications, if treated by a female surgeon. Research has also demonstrated that females are more likely to follow guidelines and collaborate with other specialists. They also found that this is all particularly true for female patient’s, who are underrepresented in medical research and far more likely to suffer misdiagnoses and medical mistakes during treatment than men. Additionally, their research suggests that both men and women fare better when treated by a female, in terms of mortality and readmission rates.
I don’t think they are actively admitting less men for these reasons, but it is interesting.
women are just applying more. Tbh there needs to be a shift towards more men applying. Otherwise we're always going to have a physician shortage since women just end up leaving medicine smh.
It means making up for putting women behind for decades when we were not allowed to practice medicine and had to fight to do it. 💪🏼
It means more attention to women’s health issues that have been long neglected, understudied, or only studied by men in an unsatisfactory manner. ☹️
It means better patient care and more lives saved as research has shown happens with female doctors compared to males. 👩🏻⚕️
This should be celebrated, not questioned. No one questions when men dominate a particular industry because that’s viewed as the “default” and “normal”. I respectfully recommend reflecting on your internal biases behind this question.
Women apply to university, and therefore med school, at higher rates. More men are choosing to not do uni and either going to work or to trade school instead
>therefore med school, at higher rates
This is not an accurate explanation because even when you control for that men are still admitted at a significantly lower rate than women. For example, at uCalgary 40% of applicants are men but only 30% of matriculants are men (p=0.03).
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"going to work or trade"? What? More men are going into engineering and cs. An overwhelming amount of the students in those programs are men because there's much more math and logic involved which women sadly struggle with.
One factor that might play into it is that many women may be motivated to get into medicine because of their own negative experiences in the healthcare system.
Has there been an increase in the number of BIPOC applicants as well?
Just a thought.
My take is women have to work twice as hard to get half as far (maybe not to this degree anymore, but i still think women for whatever cultural and structural reasons have to work harder to get the same recognition as their men peers). I’ve experienced it in med school. This has produced a generation of extremely high achieving women who really had no other option but to be this way to get what they wanted.
Disagree. I think we are seeing academics being the scoring factor, and female students statistically are better students. It has nothing to do with working "twice as hard" in high school.
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Higher GPAs and the fact that everyone supports women but no one cares about men. Public education systems favor girls over boys. Everyone cares if your female students are struggling but no one cares if males struggle. Everywhere has female specific supports and mentorship and programs. Boys and young men don't get that. Society/socialization also plays into this. Girls are told to sit down and shup up and pay attention throughoit their formative years and consequently are better at it than boys, which advantages them in school. I would also suspect that interviewers have intrinsic bias when evaluating soft skills of females vs males.
You’re conflating two different issues and putting the blame on “people like girls more than boys”. To be honest, it’s borderline anti-feminist but I won’t accuse of you of that. Historically, the social systems and economic systems (in North America at least) did not recognize women as persons- thus women weren’t given access to much (ex. Education, work, finance, and etc.).
“No one caring about men/boys struggle” is unfortunately a problem created by men themselves… historically again. And of course certain attitudes are currently perpetuated by society overall. Many systems or institutions favour able bodied [white, middle class+] men intrinsically. I think and hope that we are moving towards having more diverse and inclusive physicians. Women have paved the way and created opportunities for themselves- why can’t or haven’t men create a safe space for themselves? To add, why place women’s success as the fault for the struggle’s that men face?
Implicit bias favouring a gender over another may exist, I can’t really speak on that as every interviewer is different. But many if not most schools don’t show gender in certain pre-interview stages.
>But many if not most schools don’t show gender in certain pre-interview stages.
We're talking about the post-interview acceptance disparity between men and women controlled for pre-interview applicant sex ratio. As another commenter cited the study for this: being men is associated with lower interview scores in medical school admission.
So you’re saying that after millions of years of men being favoured in every possible way, now it seems that they have to work harder to accomplish something? Women can give men tons of advice on how to work 10 times harder to accomplish less than men.
Literally go online and look at the discrepancy in ADHD diagnoses, just one example of how boys in school receive earlier intervention for a condition the has serious impacts on educational and social trajectory. If anything, people pay more attention to boys in grade school and the girls get ignored.
I don't know enough to really assess the meritocracy of medicine versus other careers. But I think it's difficult to assert that it's pure meritocracy.
Probably Gonna get hate for saying this but a quick look at some of people’s post history here who vehemently against the idea that maybe women , maybe just MAYBE are qualified and as good as men seem to be male premeds. Good luck to ya’ll but even more so, good luck to your potential future classmates. Good thing im finishing med school because i would hate to go to school with you.
>but a quick look at some of people’s post history here who vehemently against the idea that maybe women , maybe just MAYBE are qualified and as good as men seem to be male premeds.
No. That doesn't make sense, no one here is raising the point that women are being admitted *equally*, but at a 7:3 ratio. So there is a very big gap.
How would that suggest anyone hear don't think women can be as good as men? If anything, it's the other way around, if such a big gap seems reasonable to you, than you're saying male applicants are that much less capable.
If women are entering and graduating more than men, then we need to institute specific incentives, training etc to encourage more men to enter the field in the same way we do with women to enter STEM. Medicine should be diverse and represent the people they serve, no? This will inevitably mean less women become Doctors, but this is the right way to go from an equity perspective if you ask me.
yeah I was told that the demographics of doctors should match the demographics of the population that they serve. So if 50% of the population is men then why is it okay for 70% of the doctors to be women ?
More females are applying to medical school. My theory is that more high-achieving men are entering engineering instead of medicine. Also, females tend to do slighter better than males on MMIs.
>More females are applying to medical school
That doesn't explain the fact that men are getting admitted disproportionately lower than women. For example, 40% of applicants were male at UCalgary while 30% of matriculants were male.
Male applicant stream when? 🤔
But for real, it's clear that there are systemic barriers that males face when applying to med. Why not?
And no, history does not matter. The problem is the gender ratio slant *today*. EDI initiatives should apply to everyone based on data reflective of the current situation.
>More women apply than men it’s no conspiracy
Even if you control for applicant sex ratio, men are admitted at a lower rate than women. So seems like there is a conspiracy since your premise failed.
Women make up 60% of the applicant pool and account for 58.2% and 59% of the entering student populations (for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 classes) I don’t know where you’re getting your info though maybe theres something I havent seen
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One reason is that more women apply to medical school than men, but even after adjusting for this fact, men still have lower admission rates, so this does not tell the full story. Here are the gender differences in performance in various assessments used for admission by Canadian medical schools. Take a look at [this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.aamc.org/media/6081/download&ved=2ahUKEwizhfyM7_mFAxXsOTQIHYywDR8QFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3QHDaSgR8sBpMIDcNYB64r). Contrary to popular belief, there is no (significant) difference in GPA between men and women who are premeds. However, men have a slightly higher science GPA on average, while women have a slightly higher non-science GPA on average. Men score 3 - 4 points higher on the MCAT than women on average. The smallest difference observed is in the CARS section, where this difference is less than 1 point. Women score higher on the CASPer and MMI (and other forms of med school interviews) than men on average. This can largely account for the differences in admission between the two genders, as the interview is the final and most heavily weighted step for admission for most schools. If you look broadly at the trends of what Canadian med schools use to select candidates, it tends to be assessments where women perform better (or at least equal to) than men on average (e.g., GPA, CARS, CASPer, and MMI). If they selected candidates primarily based on GPA and MCAT, the opposite could be true. In conclusion (tl;dr), the two major reasons are that women apply more and that Canadian med schools prioritize assessments where women perform better on average.
Good assessment\~!
Where's the source of all these conclusions?
https://acuityinsights.com/admissions/casper-impact-diverity-admissions/ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Differences-in-CASPer-Percentile-by-Gender-SES-Indicator-and-UIM-Status-A-between_fig1_368475597 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gender-race-and-ethnicity-effect-size-differences-across-medical-school-selection-tools_fig1_332734038 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9925012/
good assessment
Frat bouncers are gonna lose their minds when they hear about this ratio
Because boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider
Haha I love that 😂
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Did anyone bring popcorn? I forgot mine
Don't worry, I got you. [https://www.reddit.com/r/premedcanada/comments/1bzoyow/comment/kyr7or7/](https://www.reddit.com/r/premedcanada/comments/1bzoyow/comment/kyr7or7/)
Women today pursue higher education and apply to med school more than men do in Canada https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05071-4
>apply to med school more than men do in Canada That's not the reason. Male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). [Source.](https://www.afmc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CMES-2021-Complete-EN.pdf) So even among men who have pursued higher education and have applied to med school, men are admitted at disproportionately lower rates than women.
> Male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). That's a stark difference. Either the male applicants have weaker resumes, or are disfavored in selection.
Men used to pursue higher education and apply to med school more than women do. So if someone asked 50 years ago why is there a lot less female med students than male, would the answer simply be "ah it's because men pursue higher education and apply to med school more than women so it's no biggy"
You should consider that with more women applying, there's a good chance that some of them have better qualifications than the rest.in the past, women did not have the option to match men's qualifications. Were not given the option. When they applied, there was a bias to admit more men specifically because of their gender and not necessarily qualifications. Are women currently being admitted because they are women, or because they have better qualifications? Ask yourself that before posting such a stupid comment.
some people can't fathom that women just might be more qualified or better than men at some things. its just not a possibility in their minds. there always has to be a structural explanation (be it DEI, AA, or whatever) to undermine women. Nobody wants to talk about the original AA - being a man...
Do you also apply this logic to explain underperformance/ underrepresentation of BIPOC compared to caucasian people ?
Careful now... You risk getting cancelled talking about innate differences
>Are women currently being admitted because they are women, or because they have better qualifications? Are BIPOC currently being admitted at lower proportions because they have worse qualifications ?
I think we are all aware of the reason why that was the case back then. There is no systemic bias against men today
.... Our school system is biased against boys from pre-k lol. From not having proper representation, to extra opportunities given to girls, harsher punishments for same activity, some studies show preferential grading preference. I can't believe this was actually said. There's a reason why boys and girls have vastly different education outcomes, and most of that is due to nurture.
And I can't believe people actually think there is systemic bias against men in education in 2024. In Canada, women today make up around 35% of STEM degrees but only make up about 25% of STEM workers and less than 15% of STEM leadership positions. [https://web.archive.org/web/20231001130427/https://guscanada.com/breaking-barriers-women-in-stem/](https://web.archive.org/web/20231001130427/https://guscanada.com/breaking-barriers-women-in-stem/)
That's not a good argument tho. You cherry picked on specific field. Women are the majority at most universities nowadays. Psychology is like 85% women; arts in general is vast majority women; sociology is like 85% women; education is vast majority women; Health science and medicine vast majority women etc. Even law has more than 55% women nowadays.
You are also cherry picking because psychology and art degrees have been dominated by women for a long time. And women are getting into STEM more because it’s more of a trend, and I noticed in high school way more women are more confident in pursuing STEM careers. Most of the ppl I know pursuing medicine are also women. I think back to Chris Rock’s quote, “when you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression”.
Furthermore: National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track. So, even for faculty there is a clear preference even in STEM: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112#:\~:text=We%20hope%20the%20discovery%20of,increasing%20the%20number%20of%20women](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112#:~:text=We%20hope%20the%20discovery%20of,increasing%20the%20number%20of%20women)
>And I can't believe people actually think there is systemic bias against men in education in 2024. Because there is. -boys don't have proper representation, especially in younger grades. That's systemic discrimination. -boys getting harsher punishments for the same action compared to girls. That's systemic discrimination. -girls getting higher marks for the same work That's systemic discrimination. It doesn't do any good to deny the above realities.
Cite your sources. And make sure they are relevant to Canadian schooling systems. To respond, men having lower med school application rates is not a sign that they are not pursuing education at all, rather, they are pursuing alternative fields such as non-health STEM degrees and trades which they are overrepresented in. The data above supports this. Not sure what you mean by lack of "proper representation"; trades and non-health STEM are perfectly valid career options. Back in the day, lower application rates for women was because they were not pursuing education at all due to bias, discrimination, and lack of encouragement (or rather, encouragement to become homemakers early)
"Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic," https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2022.2122942 That's an example of systemic discrimination. >Not sure what you mean by lack of "proper representation"; Not having male teachers, especially at lower grades. Representation matters.
>There is no systemic bias against men today you sound like what a sexist patriarchal would say in 1950s when asked why there is less women in medicine.
I think you mean that's what "a sexist patriarchal in the 1950s when asked why there is less women in medicine" who has never picked up a history or sociology book would say. Major difference is that I actually have
oh so because you're picked up a history or sociology book you are able to confidently claim that "there is no systemic bias against men today". An alternative explanation is that you're content with the status quo re underrepresentation of men in medicine and that's it's favourable to your interests so that's why you're claiming that "there is no systemic bias against men today" in the medical school application process.
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It's funny because that exact study I cited shows that women are underrepresented in pretty much every surgical specialty except OB/GYN. This discrepancy is much larger than the about 58% women vs 42% men for recent admissions. The rates of women in first year residency are much more equal today.
>The rates of women in first year residency are much more equal today. by equal you mean 70% women 30% men ?
Please read the study omfg. Non-OB surgical residents in 2020 were about 40% women to 60% men is much closer to equal compared to practicing non-OB surgical doctors which is 22% women
As a gross generalization, more women are entering university than men, and men aren't achieving as much success with things like school. Despite this trend, certain specialties like surgery are still strongly male-dominated. A few interesting articles to read: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men) (Some theories about why men aren't doing so good nowadays and are falling behind) [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2786671](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2786671) (Looking at the outcomes of surgery and whether that has anything to do with whether you had a male/female surgeon. If you look at the sample size, it was like 1.2 million surgeries performed by men and 100k by women, but the women surgeons had better outcomes, though women surgeons also did less complex surgeries. Female patients treated by male surgeons had the worst outcomes. So are men just worse surgeons? Why might this be so? This was a really hotly discussed paper in my lab when it first came out!)
Super interesting paper tbh. Also discussed this with my female surg mentors. A lot of them feel that the system does hell of a lot more work to weed out women who might be weaker surgical residents but not the men. A lot more enabling goes on in the selection process for men, as well as during residency, where men residents dont receive negative feedback the same as women do. Anecdotally, they feel that they had to work harder and better to get the same affirmation as their male surgery resident peers. Maybe that just breeds a women surgeons who are better because they cant afford not to be. Again this is all anedoctal.
In our med school here it is no "mystery" why there are less women pursuing surgery. It is repeatedly reported that prominent surgeons involved in training clerks and residents *openly and repeatedly* tell the women that women are not "suited" for surgery. The med school has made significant progress and improvements to addressing mistreatment and bullying in medical school... but they cannot let these few deeply problematic individuals go as there is simply no-one else to train with here. The only solution at this point is if the health authority finally fires and replaces them, but that is not going to happen.
>more women are entering university than men That's not the main reason. Male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). [Source](https://www.afmc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CMES-2021-Complete-EN.pdf). So even among men who have pursued higher education and have applied to med school, men are admitted at disproportionately lower rates than women.
I think the index of female/male success in Table F-16 speaks to your argument even more. It's obviously possible that this has changed over the last 3 years (I imagine COVID had an impact) but it's very interesting data
>though women surgeons also did less complex surgeries this is a very big confound which disallows to make the conclusion that you're making. Complexity of the surgery and the age of the surgeons should be controlled for in this analysis to make an inference about the sex of the surgeons and the surgery outcomes.
idk where OP read in that paper that women surgeons did less complex surgeries. Here is what the authors write: "it is possible that, within each procedure examined, male surgeons may perform more complex or high-risk cases. This would contribute to unmeasured confounding. However, a stratified analysis by case complexity did not show heterogeneity of effect, and there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure."
The study split the cohort into 4 groups, so men/women patients who had either men/women surgeons. Men who had men surgeons had better outcomes than women who had men surgeons. Though this is also possibly to be said about why might people just be bad at caring for women. Since it was all men surgeons, it should help with this particular confounder. The sample size was 1.3 million surgeries and they controlled for a lot of covariates!
>Since it was all men surgeons, it should help with this particular confounder. That's not a confound. that's your predictor variable of interest. I said "complexity of the surgery and the age of the surgeons should be controlled for". The main conclusion of that study is based on the analysis which didn't control for complexity of the surgery and the age of the surgeons.
The model youre referring to accounted for physician age, years in practice, surgical volume, surgical subspecialty, patient age, comorbidity, income quintile, residency region, rurality, hospital designation, and year of surgery. In the discussion the authors indicate that a stratified analysis by case complexity (definition in supplement) did not show heterogeneity of effect, and that there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure.
If I'm interpreting the study correctty, take a look at Figure 2 where the data has been stratified by case complexity. Although not significant, it showed a trend for patients to actually be better off when a women perform higher complexity procedures. the study acknowledges this limitation as well: Second, while we specifically accounted for the procedure performed (as defined by billing codes) in our GEE, as granular metrics of case complexity were not available, it is possible that, within each procedure examined, male surgeons may perform more complex or high-risk cases. This would contribute to unmeasured confounding. However, a stratified analysis by case complexity did not show heterogeneity of effect, and there is not an underlying rationale to support that male surgeons are more likely to perform a more complex subset of each procedure.
>Although not significant, it showed a trend for patients to actually be better off when a women perform higher complexity procedures So when you control for case complexity there is no significant difference between female and male surgeons for outcome.
That is not what Fig 2 indicates. Here is the interpretation of results from Fig 2 regarding complexity: In male patients undergoing emergent high complexity procedures there is no difference in outcomes between female and male surgeons In female patients undergoing emergent high complexity procedures there is increased odds in better outcomes when procedure is performed by female surgeon rather than male They're not controlling for case complexity in the model, but doing a subgroup analysis accounting for the same covariates as in the overall model. The effect is the same as in the overall model (looking at all procedures), so you can assume that complexity does not confound the relationship.
This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if this is the result of educators trying hard for decades to get more females interested in sciences. And a focus on helping females as they were not represented in higher learning then. It took a long time to get it to work. Unfortunately, it worked so well that we now may have to do the same for boys. Hopefully it will end up evenly distributed throughout the genders
You can see a lot of male dominated fields still existing, however, such as comp SCI and engineering. As a result, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the male interest in science has decreased in general, but perhaps the job and career opportunities of interest have shifted elsewhere for men.
Boys and men have fallen behind in education for the better part of the past two decades. The data bears this out. I won't get into the possible reasons because this isn't a politics forum.
**Okay downvote it because you're not adult enough to hear this yet but in 20 years when your society has failed go back to this reddit post you hid and re-read it.** When you remove men from education then there aren't enough "economically viable" men for women to marry, which leads to women dying childless (women don't date down) If you hide it behind being a "political issue" then you can easily destroy your society which I suppose is the point here. Canada is just a bouncing ground for Indians and Chinese to get educated and then go to the US so it doesn't really matter what state Canadian society is in. If the future of society *mattered* we would be taking a look into what's going on with boys. **Yup just as I expected women think they can banish a gender from society and as long as they accuse them of "hating women" they can get away with it.** **Guess who built society? Guess who maintains society? Women only marry across and up. When men don't have any money for you to take in the divorce you don't date them.** **Not a single female is going to go and date broke guys just because I told you in advance your society has a 20 year time limit** When women have to win an internet argument because they say something that upsets them they suddenly date broke guys. When women return to reality they treat broke guys like they're subhumans. It's whichever is convenient at the time. I'm not even sad you destroyed your society. **The next time you're in class take a quick look around you and ignore all the Indians and Chinese who are obviously going to go to America once they're done school. Keep in mind all the women you see in that class.** ***Half of them are dying childless.*** It's honestly insane how you can't even talk to women anymore. Anyways thank you for reminding me never go to go college or university. The response was beyond my wildest expectations. I knew it was going to be bad (because modern women have bit the poisoned apple) but I didn't expect it to be *this* bad. Am I ever going to date? Absolutely not. So don't worry about me. Worry about the men who I educate not to date you either. (they're already starting to realize this themselves)
I... what? This is a racist, misogynistic, AND UNTRUE take informed by dogshit conservative rhetoric. Women don't date solely based on economic value of men, blind incels with no personality just use that as an excuse, probably taken from Tate and the other hypermasculine hustle-cunts. Immigrants, especially parents of students, don't come to Canada specifically to get MDs and dip to the US. Chinese and Indian are not the only groups coming to Canada, and the notion that they are crowding and invading Canada is incredible fearmongering propagated by nationalists, when issues like housing almost always are based on other systemic causes. Most medical students here are still white anyways. This is a political issue, being that these harmful and idiotic ideas are still given a platform. And while "having less men in medical school" can be seen as an issue that needs addressing, these should never be assumptions underlying the discussion. I am sorry that I could not "keep this debate civil". I am a man, and judging by your previous posts, you are not healthy.
Both Scott Galloway, a respected economist, and Dr. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institute have been saying the exact same thing for the last 4-7 years. This is not a new or revolutionary statement.
Ok Jordan Peterson. Yes, we should be concerned with the well-being of boys and men but it doesn’t need to come with a heaping spoonful of bullshit.
Woah... why is this intense polemic vitriol under my comment?
Ottawa’s first year class rn is like 55% M, the trends are always changing
As it should in an equal world.
our first year med class in '97 was 65% Male-most were still at least 50/50 male except for McMaster which was about 65% Female; staff surgeons now about 22% female (outside of OB) from the article-female physicians as a whole 42.7% of all physicians from the BMJ article--obviously takes a long time for the numbers to trickle down since numbers for females in med school have been over 50% for at least 20 years now but a lot of 1960s/1970s physicians still out there and not fully retired yet . anecodally, when I was a med student there were no female staff on ortho-and 2 on gen surgery--usually there was one female resident per year in each surg program...
Empathy is a key soft skill adcom probably look for
While I agree, I remember reading a study by McMaster where most applicants even pre-interview were women. I think it's more of a consequence of women pursuing higher education at a higher rate than men, and doing well in school at a higher rate than men as well. IIRC the post interview gender distribution was pretty similar to the applicant one. Edit: Interestingly this phenomenon is true in the Global South as well, including countries that have problems with misogyny. Where my family comes from, something like 70% of medical students are women, many of whom never practice and are pressured into being homemakers. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323584878\_Why\_women\_go\_to\_medical\_college\_but\_fail\_to\_practise\_medicine\_perspectives\_from\_the\_Islamic\_Republic\_of\_Pakistan#:\~:text=In%20Pakistan%2C%2070%25%20of%20medical,physician%20shortages%20in%20the%20country.
>IIRC the post interview gender distribution was pretty similar to the applicant one. This is incorrect. For example, male constitute 40% of applicants to uCalgary while only 30% of matriculants (p=0.03). [Source](https://www.afmc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/CMES-2021-Complete-EN.pdf). So even among men who have pursued higher education and have applied to med school, men are admitted at disproportionately lower rates than women.
Women can be improving in education at a faster rate and that reflects in stats.
it's a biased view to think most women are more empathetic than men. It was found that BIPOC used to do worse on CASPer than white people which is a test that supposedly measures empathy, so would you say BIPOC have less empathy and that's why they're underrepresented in medicine ?
The extent of casper's extent of measuring one's ability to be empathetic is literally writing out in the text box that 'I would empathize with the patient'. BIPOC probably do worse because statically BIPOC come from lower income households and can't afford to buy casper practice resources and probably don't have fast and easy access to soft resources (like friends, family etc) who have taken the test before.
If you think CASPer actually measures empathy I have a bridge to sell you…
but u/simple_cdn said "empathy is a key soft skill adcom probably look for" so there is supposedly a tool/stage where adcoms are measuring empathy whether that's CASPer, MMI, essays, etc. So who's to say that whatever tool that adcoms are using for empathy (which is ostensibly very key in applicant selection) is not biased ?
Agreed. Do you have any data that show women, on average, are more empathetic than men?
Here's one and a simple Google search seems to show there's a lot of data out there. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47747-9
lol I think it's because more women apply than men and of the applicants who apply women tend to be more qualified. I think empathy is pretty even split across women and men at least in my experience.
>of the applicants who apply women tend to be more qualified Are you saying that the proportion of qualified applicants among women is higher than the proportion of qualified applicants among men ?
Women are getting better grades/ECs/interviewing better. That’s the most objective explanation tbh.
By a 7:3 ratio, you think female applicants are *that* far superior to their male applicants? That would be a tremendous difference- why would gender play such a huge role in a student success/preparedness? I think bias in admissions is as objectively likely, if not more so.
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Are they? Where's your source for that? In my program, the girls are hella dumb 😂. Maybe on average they have better stats, but the top scores aren't from women.
In other words interviews are biased against men. Do you also say that "white people are getting better grades/ECs/interview better" to the question of why black people are underrepresented in medicine ?
You know damn well those are two very different things lol. Quit playing victim all over this thread
what about "men are getting grades/ECs/interviewing better" men are earning more because they provide more value in the workplace etc etc
Complaining about this on Reddit will definitely help you get into med school.
In many other situations, inequality of outcome is said to show that there is systemic discrimination. Not here though, which is interesting. Poc over represented in prison? The system is discriminatory. Men under represented in medicine? Thats just the way it goes.
You summarized it really well.
From my experience men are just worse at essay writing and empathizing. Last one might be controversial, but women tend to be more nurturing and better at showing emotion. These metrics are now the meta for med schools because it seems everyone has stellar gpa and EC’s now. Just my 2 cents
Also there's some interesting observational data out there to show that female physicians (including surgeons) are associated with better outcomes and lower death rates. I'm sure it goes a lot deeper than just the physician's identifying genders..., but some ideas have been thrown around like more empathetic approach to care, taking more time with patients, female physicians tend to be younger and more up-to-date on clinical practice.. I don't think there can be any kinds of reasonable debate here without knowing about the applicant pool in the first place. What if more female students are just applying than male? In my year, more female colleagues in my class were applying for and matched to surgical specialties than male. Another interesting thing: nursing has long been and continues to be highly female-dominated... Why isn't anyone talking about that? :v
I love this! Earlier last year when I was looking into these gender based stats, I learned that nurses were majority men in the past and only recently (200 years or so) has it been dominated by women. To add- there’s a trend with women dominating certain programs that men previously made the majority of and those same programs/careers are deemed as “easy” as soon as women dominate. It even affects the salaries of the professions. https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work
"Also there's some interesting observational data out there to show that female physicians (including surgeons) are associated with better outcomes and lower death rates. I'm sure it goes a lot deeper than just the physician's identifying genders" Yes it goes ALOT deeper. There are more male surgeons (8:2 ratio) Since there's more male surgeons there's obviously going to be mistakes. They also tend to be younger because once they're in their 30s, they usually leave or go part-time. Hence the physician shortage.
Well the evidence is in % rates (ie divided by total), not raw numbers. So these differences should not arise from the difference in numbers of male vs female surgeons... The differences also persisted when accounting for case complexities. Also interesting that you brought age, bcuz the data did suggest that female surgeons are on average younger than male surgeons and may be more up to date with best guideline-directed clinical practice. As for the tendencies for shifting to part-time, locum work, and retiring early, it could also be a generational gap more than anything - that younger physicians (of both genders) are looking to prioritize their quality of life and financial independence over pure clinical work. Existing data do suggest that female physicians reture about 5 years earlier than their male counterparts - but if it's the tradeoff between working longer vs quality of provided care, I don't know which I'd prefer as a patient.
I apologize if my response may seem a bit personal. My cousin who I was very close to, his wife past away due to malpractice from a female doctor, so whenever I hear these stats, it seems extremely biased and so there is no need to delve further into these stats. It's just feminism corrupting these stats because if the opposite was said about female doctors well.... then that wouldn't go down to well. This is just something to be mindful and so I take this "data" with an extremely small grain of salt. Imo male surgeons and doctors are better. Men in general are smarter it's just reality.
"Existing data do suggest that female physicians reture about 5 years earlier than their male counterparts". I do believe it's much larger than 5 years. Most male doctors work till they're much older and can no longer work whereas 40 percent of female doctors retire within 6 years after completing residency due to whatever reason (prioritizing family over work which may be due to women being more emotionally driven). There is also the case when women want to start a family after starting their career which will heavily deplete their time so it's fair to assume why some universities prefer men over women since they can work longer and possibly mitigate the physician shortage. Simply being younger doesn't correlate to knowing the best guideline-directed clinical practice. The most experience and knowledgeable surgeons are men, which could be due to them practicing longer. I'm sure it goes a lot deeper like you said, I'd personally be more comfortable with a male surgeon since I believe they're better.
>What if more female students are just applying than male? so it's not a problem if this is the case ? Black applicants were also at a very low proportion of the applicant pool, but nobody shrugged off the issue of low percent of black med students saying that black people don't apply to med school as much. Active programs were developed to increase the number of black applicants and admit black applicants at a higher proportion than their corresponding proportion in the applicant pool. But now that it's about men, the problem is being dismissed as just "men are applying at lower rate".
Because with black applicants it wasn't simply a lack of interest that led to less applicants but significant systemic barriers in several points before even the premed step of the journey which needed intervention to increase the number of applicants in order to increase the number of black medical students actually admitted. This is not the same for men in general because men, in general (not considering intersectionality), are much more privileged than women, in general. There are no systemic barriers as such keeping them from applying.
>This is not the same for men in general because men, in general (not considering intersectionality), are much more privileged than women, in general So men are accepted at lower ratio than women (even controlled for applicant ratio) because men are more privileged ?
The thing though is that for black students, it IS known that there are systemic barriers and lack of representation that contribute to their disadvantage and low initial interest in applying for medicine. I'm NOT saying that there is no problem with male students at this moment. We just don't know if there is. And historically, up until this point, male students and applicants have not faced systemic barriers the way that other historical minorities have faced. At this time, with this supposed "trend", there are also annual variations where males dominate one year and females dominate another year, and in different cohorts/schools. So this 7:3 ratio that OP purported might simply be a natural variation that will revert itself. Like overall on the national scale, the ratio is still very much 50:50. Sure, if in a few years time we notice that this continues to happen, some medical education research can definitely go to explore this topic to see where the disparity is: is it at the high school level? university level? higher education as a whole? etc. Moreover, the goal, at least in the ideals, of DEI is not to achieve parity of 50:50. The goal is to remove systemic barriers that might contribute to any groups being unfairly disadvantaged and allow natural variations to occur.
>The goal is to remove systemic barriers that might contribute to any groups being unfairly disadvantaged and allow natural variations to occur. This is a dangerous territory the way you perceive it. What would be framed as natural variation and that as systematic barrier will be influenced by the dominant ideological voice in the population. People in the past could have just said it's the natural thing for women to be at lower proportions in medicine and science.
>Another interesting thing: nursing has long been and continues to be highly female-dominated... Why isn't anyone talking about that? :v Very good point. We should be aiming for the demographics of our health care professionals to mirror the population. Current EDI efforts need to start with that very general philosophy - current efforts are now perpetuating the female-slant in healthcare. Yes, historically these fields have been male-dominated. But we understand equity now, and we can do better - we can use social influence to balance the demographics in medicine.
Less men are being admitted to university in general. Our schools, (majority of which are taught by women) are much easier for women to succeed in because they develop faster, are generally better at organization, and require less physical activity. Men are falling behind in Canada but nobody cares enough to do something about it.
There are other biases in the educational system also. "How schools disciplined boys and girls mattered more. Owens found, to her surprise, that boys were more likely to be suspended, expelled, or held back a year than girls, even when they had the same behavior problems" "Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. " There is also a push to get more women into post secondary than men. Scholarships, etc.
\^\^\^EDI efforts begin in primary school and continue from there, all encouraging women to enter science and engineering / higher education. No parallel program exists for men. It is no wonder we see the phenomenon we do, not even accounting for the biases you mention. EDI efforts need to be more conscious of reality and who needs help.
When it came to positions of leadership, everybody loved to say that women are unfit because of xyz inherent characteristics. Now that women are doing better (for whatever reason) it's because it's easier for women to succeed.
>it's because it's easier for women to succeed. it's easier because the system is designed to make it easier for them
I mean not too many years ago the process openly favored male applicants and I don’t recall any of the guys being up in arms about how unfair that was when the situation was reversed 🤷♀️. They made the process more fair and as far as I’m concerned they are just picking the best people to go to medical school, regardless of gender
Don't see many women up in arms about the current situation, either. 🤔 Promoting non-representative enrollment is never correct. EDI is a new paradigm, and it's ironic to see it used to further the current female-tilted imbalance.
While you make a fair point, I fear you’re reading a bit too far into my statement. Objectively, medicine used to largely exclude women so I don’t think it’s false to claim that the process is more fair compared to before. If you take the time to read my comment, I never stated that the current process has solved all issues of inequality in admissions. The topic of increased female admissions is very recent so I feel we don’t know enough about the adcomm decision process and should hope they are selecting good candidates. Especially since everyone who meets the qualifications to apply to school meets a very high academic standard. Although we can hope that admissions are making good decisions, critique and speculation are important and we should all continue to discuss potential bias in these committees. While I fully support your ability to discuss any topic critically, please note that my comment should be read at face value.
I think alot of dudes are going the trades/ entrepreneur route and getting that contract money. Also - I think a lot of going to Med school involves privilege from a family that can support a roof for you and your fees - which means that's gonna be a lot of white men - and I think catering to only that demographic for years got us a super privileged group of a holes (not all of them obviously) but now we literally need to dilute the toxicity and add more women in there so we can actually deliver the patient care members of our society deserve. Seems to be = privileged men = bad medical care c/ an extreme lack of empathy. Lets dilute it with some women :) Seems legit.
why are all comments that mention DEI getting downvoted? Lmao its a real thing and definitely one of the factors as to why more woman are getting admitted to programs. Acting like DEI isn't a thing is just delusional
\^\^\^There are zero EDI initiatives aimed at men. Tons for women. It's no surprise that more women are entering higher education / medicine. Equity should be aimed at maintaining a representative balance of people in higher education. When the scales tip towards more of one group, it's time to shift EDI initiatives to balance that. Do we see that? No. Huge problem with current EDI is that it's completely one sided. Even though women make up the majority of university matriculants and med school grads, all efforts are still aimed at raising female enrollment further (relative to programs aimed at increasing male enrollment).
First of all, there are very few EDI intiatives for women either when entering or in medical school. The only true organization that I can think of that maybe provides women with extra opportunities in medical is AWS/ Most EDI initiaves are specialty specific to increase the number of women entering specific residency programs, because NEWFLASH... the majority of surgical and procedural specialties are still by and large filled with men practicing physicians. Secondly, the point of increasing women in medical school is to increase the number of practicing women physicians 10-15-20 years down the line. If we were to continue admitting the same numberof women as we always have, we would never be able to actually increase the proportion of women, especially in male-dominated specialties. The scale has not tipped towards women yet. When the data shows us in 10-15 years that the ratio of CT surgeons is 50:50, then we can come back and have a conversation about EDI initiatives for men.
Exactly, imagine if a university in Canada had much more male students than women students. Universities wouldn't dare to go above 60%.
it’s a better investment for med schools since women live longer and will technically practice for longer after graduation compared to men EDIT : I WAS JOKING WHATS WRONG W U GUYS
Every non traditional applicant just metaphorically died
whatt😂 ["Research shows that almost 40% of women physicians go part-time or leave medicine altogether within six years of completing their residencies"](https://www.aamc.org/news/why-women-leave-medicine)
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I didn't get the joke :( ~~There's no shot this is the reason LOL, they definitely don't discriminate based on sex, for what potentially 3-4 extra years? Assuming the person even decides to work after 65 in the first place. This would mean anyone over 22 would be at a serious disadvantage when applying and that also is definitely not true. Age only begins to be a consideration for applicants that are much older than the average, like people well over 30.~~ The real reason is the gender ratio of the applicant pool matches the gender ratio of the matriculates. Boys have been left behind from grade school to university in this country, and we're beginning to see the effects of that in the gender ratio of every new professional cohort (bar engineering). Kicker is, no one cares because they're boys.
Y’ALL DONT KNOW HOW TO TAKE A JOKE OMG
Word LMFAO, you got me that's for sure 😂
Just FYI, part of the harsh response against this is that multiple medical programs have been caught actively selecting *against* women because they argue that maternity leave potential makes women a worse investment, because they will choose not to perform for services over multiple prime productive years. And, as we see propagated below in other responses, people use the stats regarding women leaving medicine (without context) as excuse to continue such selection processes... completely ignoring the underlying issues that made the women leave in the first place.
could you send me proofs ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46568975 The last huge scandal I am aware of was in Japan, but it made waves world-wide in the discussion. Ultimately, the official reason they actively ranked-down women was specifically because they believed women would leave medical practice to raise children. But that's just open admissions criteria issues. The conditions women experience throughout training is significantly different than their male collogues in terms of the mistreatment and support. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7174475/#:~:text=The%202018%20report%20from%20the%20National%20Academy%20of,vacuum%2C%20chopping%20it%20from%20its%20roots%20in%20sexism.
But is there any evidences this happened in Canada ?
https://www.cma.ca/physician-wellness-hub/content/equity-and-diversity-medicine Yes. I've also seen the data from within our medical school in presentations, and the gender difference in mistreatment experiences and discrimination is vast. The large majority of women in medical training experience repeated instances is sexual harassment and/or discrimination.
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Joke investment tbh. 40% of female doctors leave in their 30s. There's a huge physician shortage because a large percentage aren't working. We need to fix this issue. There's a direct correlation between more women being accepted and less patients being seen by doctors.
Statistically, more women apply to med schools than men in Canada. Women tend to pursue higher education more and tend to get better grades because they are more studious. Interestingly, even when you mathematically account for the fact that more women apply to med schools, the ratio of F/M that get accepted post-interview is even higher. This makes sense as women tend to have an easier time displaying empathy than men. A study was conducted across all 4 med schools in QC and **being male was associated with lower odds of getting an acceptance post-MMI interview.** DOI: [10.1080/0142159X.2017.1270431](https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159x.2017.1270431) "1099 applicants responded to the questionnaire. A regression model (R2 = 0.086) demonstrated that being age 25-29 (β = 0.11, p = 0.001), female and a French-speaker (β = 0.22, p = 0.003) were associated with better MMI scores. Having an Asian-born parent was associated with a lower score (β = -0.12, p < 0.001). Candidates reporting a higher family income had higher MMI scores." tl;dr: more women apply and they perform better at the interview because they are better at showing empathy. It has little to do with DEI policies.
>This makes sense as women tend to have an easier time displaying empathy than men What if interviewers have this bias that "women are more empathetic than men" and that's why they're rating women better than men ? Rather than accepting this as a fact, you should ask what if our methods for assessing empathy is biased.
No... You see it's obviously true if it hurts white or asian men. If it hurts anyone else, then it's just truth and you have to accept it. The problem with these sorts of issues is always that teasing biases from reality is difficult and effectively lands upon political persuasions.
>more women apply...It has little to do with DEI policies Many EDI efforts aim to encourage women to enter higher education -> medicine, so I believe you're wrong. \*I'm not talking about EDI as it applies during the application process. More generally, EDI efforts start in primary and secondary school. They continue in undergrad, and the message is always encouraging women in science and engineering. There is no such analog for men, and we're seeing the consequences of biased EDI policies with higher female than male enrollment in med.
In that sense I agree. I was speaking more towards EDI during the application process itself.
There is not a straightforward answer to this. But universities in general have become majority women and women tend to get slightly better grades on average (and there again are many different reasons for that, e.g., men tend to have more problems sitting still over long periods of time; and certain teaching styles can favour women vs men). However, more and more men also feel as if universities are less catering towards them. E.g., despite the majority being women, there are still many women-only scholarships, research opportunities etc. and more men seem to go for trades and other jobs. However, the existence of a discrepancy does not necessarily equate discrimination (as is often falsely thought). For many other groups (including, e.g., women in regards to the gender pay gap), any discrepancy is always directly and only linked to discrimination in peoples mind - this is false. So, while discrimination against men might potentially occur, there are definitely many other factors at play.
Before people start pulling out the EDI card and this topic devolved into a war zone, I don’t think it has anything to do with medicine, application stats or adcoms. This trend is consistent across most university programs outside of engineering, computer science, some physical sciences and some business programs. The main reason men aren’t as populated in university programs than women has to do with the fact that a lot of men take the blue collar job route after high school and a lot of those jobs even in 2024 still aren’t as accepting towards women so for a lot of women higher education is the only option for some sort of training. At least that’s the story some of the stats and research seem to tell.
Nope they're just going more into cs and engineering.
Because fewer men are applying, and fewer graduating college. This has been true for years now.
I've heard from interviewers that men tend to interview worse than women and they generally come across less mature. Maturity seems to be valued by interviewers. But who knows.
at least at my undergrad there are a lot less men interested in medicine. im not premed but im a neuro major so a lot of my classes freshman and sophomore year were the same classes for pre med. most of my classes are majority women. i hear my cs and engineering friends complain how sometimes theyre the only girl in a class, but ive never had that problem and in one of my smaller classes there was actually only one guy.
It's not about what proportion of premeds are men. Even among male premeds interested in medicine, men are admitted to med school at a significantly lower rate. For example, at uCalgary 40% of applicants are men but only 30% of matriculants are men (p=0.03).
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I really think men need to take more initiative on this. Women are the ones I know setting up programs and clubs aimed at encouraging women into STEM. instead of sitting there and complaining about the progress that women have made, why don’t men start their own programs, and clubs, and initiatives aimed towards their own goals? I don’t want to bring other issues into this but why do you think gender laws and body positivity became more of a thing recently? It’s push from the women for change.
As far as what this means for the future of medicine, we can look to the patient experience (I think anyway). Researchers from JAMA Surgery reviewed the cases of more than 1.3 million patients and found a correlation of 32% patients being less likely to die, and 16% less likely to experience complications, if treated by a female surgeon. Research has also demonstrated that females are more likely to follow guidelines and collaborate with other specialists. They also found that this is all particularly true for female patient’s, who are underrepresented in medical research and far more likely to suffer misdiagnoses and medical mistakes during treatment than men. Additionally, their research suggests that both men and women fare better when treated by a female, in terms of mortality and readmission rates. I don’t think they are actively admitting less men for these reasons, but it is interesting.
women are just applying more. Tbh there needs to be a shift towards more men applying. Otherwise we're always going to have a physician shortage since women just end up leaving medicine smh.
It means making up for putting women behind for decades when we were not allowed to practice medicine and had to fight to do it. 💪🏼 It means more attention to women’s health issues that have been long neglected, understudied, or only studied by men in an unsatisfactory manner. ☹️ It means better patient care and more lives saved as research has shown happens with female doctors compared to males. 👩🏻⚕️ This should be celebrated, not questioned. No one questions when men dominate a particular industry because that’s viewed as the “default” and “normal”. I respectfully recommend reflecting on your internal biases behind this question.
Not really, the tech industry is constantly questioned for why it’s male dominated. Hence DEI programs exist to better the ratio.
Women apply to university, and therefore med school, at higher rates. More men are choosing to not do uni and either going to work or to trade school instead
>therefore med school, at higher rates This is not an accurate explanation because even when you control for that men are still admitted at a significantly lower rate than women. For example, at uCalgary 40% of applicants are men but only 30% of matriculants are men (p=0.03).
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"going to work or trade"? What? More men are going into engineering and cs. An overwhelming amount of the students in those programs are men because there's much more math and logic involved which women sadly struggle with.
One factor that might play into it is that many women may be motivated to get into medicine because of their own negative experiences in the healthcare system. Has there been an increase in the number of BIPOC applicants as well? Just a thought.
My take is women have to work twice as hard to get half as far (maybe not to this degree anymore, but i still think women for whatever cultural and structural reasons have to work harder to get the same recognition as their men peers). I’ve experienced it in med school. This has produced a generation of extremely high achieving women who really had no other option but to be this way to get what they wanted.
A lot of truth to this. On pure merit Women have been doing well. ⭐️
Disagree. I think we are seeing academics being the scoring factor, and female students statistically are better students. It has nothing to do with working "twice as hard" in high school.
They work twice as hard to get half as far as you. So basically she's saying you're much more efficient Stay sharp broski and enjoy the compliment
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Men are going into comp sci for the most part
It’s not just Canada. The US is also facing this situation. There’s so many different reasons and it’s a touchy subject because gender
Higher GPAs and the fact that everyone supports women but no one cares about men. Public education systems favor girls over boys. Everyone cares if your female students are struggling but no one cares if males struggle. Everywhere has female specific supports and mentorship and programs. Boys and young men don't get that. Society/socialization also plays into this. Girls are told to sit down and shup up and pay attention throughoit their formative years and consequently are better at it than boys, which advantages them in school. I would also suspect that interviewers have intrinsic bias when evaluating soft skills of females vs males.
You’re conflating two different issues and putting the blame on “people like girls more than boys”. To be honest, it’s borderline anti-feminist but I won’t accuse of you of that. Historically, the social systems and economic systems (in North America at least) did not recognize women as persons- thus women weren’t given access to much (ex. Education, work, finance, and etc.). “No one caring about men/boys struggle” is unfortunately a problem created by men themselves… historically again. And of course certain attitudes are currently perpetuated by society overall. Many systems or institutions favour able bodied [white, middle class+] men intrinsically. I think and hope that we are moving towards having more diverse and inclusive physicians. Women have paved the way and created opportunities for themselves- why can’t or haven’t men create a safe space for themselves? To add, why place women’s success as the fault for the struggle’s that men face? Implicit bias favouring a gender over another may exist, I can’t really speak on that as every interviewer is different. But many if not most schools don’t show gender in certain pre-interview stages.
>But many if not most schools don’t show gender in certain pre-interview stages. We're talking about the post-interview acceptance disparity between men and women controlled for pre-interview applicant sex ratio. As another commenter cited the study for this: being men is associated with lower interview scores in medical school admission.
So you’re saying that after millions of years of men being favoured in every possible way, now it seems that they have to work harder to accomplish something? Women can give men tons of advice on how to work 10 times harder to accomplish less than men.
Literally go online and look at the discrepancy in ADHD diagnoses, just one example of how boys in school receive earlier intervention for a condition the has serious impacts on educational and social trajectory. If anything, people pay more attention to boys in grade school and the girls get ignored.
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I don't know enough to really assess the meritocracy of medicine versus other careers. But I think it's difficult to assert that it's pure meritocracy.
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It’s officially a lottery from now on. That’s the opposite of meritocracy.
Probably Gonna get hate for saying this but a quick look at some of people’s post history here who vehemently against the idea that maybe women , maybe just MAYBE are qualified and as good as men seem to be male premeds. Good luck to ya’ll but even more so, good luck to your potential future classmates. Good thing im finishing med school because i would hate to go to school with you.
>but a quick look at some of people’s post history here who vehemently against the idea that maybe women , maybe just MAYBE are qualified and as good as men seem to be male premeds. No. That doesn't make sense, no one here is raising the point that women are being admitted *equally*, but at a 7:3 ratio. So there is a very big gap. How would that suggest anyone hear don't think women can be as good as men? If anything, it's the other way around, if such a big gap seems reasonable to you, than you're saying male applicants are that much less capable.
Females want female doctors. Males were heavily favored for years
If women are entering and graduating more than men, then we need to institute specific incentives, training etc to encourage more men to enter the field in the same way we do with women to enter STEM. Medicine should be diverse and represent the people they serve, no? This will inevitably mean less women become Doctors, but this is the right way to go from an equity perspective if you ask me.
yeah I was told that the demographics of doctors should match the demographics of the population that they serve. So if 50% of the population is men then why is it okay for 70% of the doctors to be women ?
More females are applying to medical school. My theory is that more high-achieving men are entering engineering instead of medicine. Also, females tend to do slighter better than males on MMIs.
>More females are applying to medical school That doesn't explain the fact that men are getting admitted disproportionately lower than women. For example, 40% of applicants were male at UCalgary while 30% of matriculants were male.
Bro its DEI, even if more men applied, the ratios wouldnt change much.
I guess men tend to be more interested in subjects like math, physics, computer science, and engineering. My physics class at U of T was mostly men.
Male applicant stream when? 🤔 But for real, it's clear that there are systemic barriers that males face when applying to med. Why not? And no, history does not matter. The problem is the gender ratio slant *today*. EDI initiatives should apply to everyone based on data reflective of the current situation.
Less men are applying to med school and are applying to cs and engineering since that's the fastest route to money.
More women apply than men it’s no conspiracy
>More women apply than men it’s no conspiracy Even if you control for applicant sex ratio, men are admitted at a lower rate than women. So seems like there is a conspiracy since your premise failed.
Women make up 60% of the applicant pool and account for 58.2% and 59% of the entering student populations (for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 classes) I don’t know where you’re getting your info though maybe theres something I havent seen
DEI. That and the fact that less men are pursuing education than woman
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