words fail

[brightlywoven]

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/336/7647/748

The sub-and-rapidly-becoming-text here being: women take responsibility for more unpaid work than their male colleagues do, so we should ration their education and employment opporunities.

Kiss my ass.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

Competing interests: none declared

What, being a male chauvinist pig doesn't count?

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Apparently not. Nor does being utterly clueless disqualify you from sounding off randomly in what is supposed to be a good journal. Phht

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

I probably shouldn't go anywhere near this, but I have the feeling that if the sexes were reversed here (the number of women medical students was at 35% and falling) there would be calls for Something To Be Done. The situation isn't the same (men were 100% of medical students not so long ago; one would expect this to have gone down) but it probably is worth finding out exactly why the percentage of men has gone down. The issue of the lack of women in various sectors of medicine seems a separate issue and also needs to be researched (says a researcher :)).

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

I see your point, but I don't think his argument follows from this. Entrance into medical degrees is open competition based on high school performance and sometimes interview. Demand for places is high, and so places go to the top high school performers. But that's an issue of university entrance in general, not just medicine. In Australia at least, it's recognised that girls are outperforming boys in high school. Do you then argue for a form of 'affirmative action' where less academically successful male students are awarded places over female applicants because of their gender? Less controversially, you might say that secondary education is not addressing the learning needs of boys, and I agree that's worth examining.

Women get into medical degrees because they fit the selection criteria. This author seemed to be arguing that an additional criteron ought to be applied - the person's preparedness to work certain hours once they graduate - and that the only available proxy for this attribute is gender. I still think that's outrageous.

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I thought his argument could and should have been phrased better.

I have heard that some American colleges already do have a form of quiet gender preferencing in favour of men to keep a rough balance between men and women; I am not sure that this is healthy or a good long-term reaction.

To be honest I would have thought that medicine was a subject where one should be looking for something in addition to raw academic skill. A lot of medical specialities seem to require more than just knowledge; one has to relate to the patient and have a good "bedside manner" as well, and I'm really not sure that A-levels capture all that.