Girls just wanna be vets

Imagine you are sitting in your first lecture of veterinary science in a university in Australia. As you look around the lecture room at the 300 other students, you would begin to notice that most of your fellow students are female, an important trend in the industry.

At the University of Sydney, the numbers of female students are close to 85 per cent of the course, with similar numbers reflected at other universities in the country and indeed worldwide.

“It’s a global trend in developed nations,” says the university’s dean of veterinary studies, professor Rosanne Taylor.

“The same is reflected in courses in Britain, the US and even India. The profession has undergone a dramatic feminisation in the past 30 years, the results of which are still being played out in the industry.”

Taylor doesn’t dismiss the role of television shows in the 1980s that portrayed women working as vets in perhaps inspiring more girls to consider the profession.

“We’ve seen a lot of very interesting and successful role models through TV shows like A Country Practice [in which Penny Cook plays Vicky the vet]. That’s a big shift from the 70s where the prevailing models were male vets like James Herriot [from the British show All Creatures Great and Small],” she says.

When searching for reasons behind this gender imbalance Taylor and her colleagues point to several factors, among them the fact that girls tend to score higher grades in high school maths and science than they did in the past and many enjoy the combination of applying science, being a business person, being independent and working with animals.

Students need to score within the top 1.4th percentile in the higher school certificate to gain entry to the course and Taylor feels high-scoring male students are often a bit more focused than their female counterparts on which degree will bring in more income. The Australian Veterinary Association says the average starting veterinary salary in Australia is $40,000.

“Many men leaving high school with these marks would expect to graduate on to very good salaries and so are more likely to look at engineering, medicine or dentistry,” she says.

Many women leaving university search for associate roles in boutique practices where they can get work flexibility, says Debbie Neutze, the AVA’s national strategy and services manager.

“Wherever possible we encourage women to try to own their own business, so we try to encourage [them to develop] business skills,” she says.

Neutze sold her three veterinary practices in Sydney’s west recently and says more men than women have tended to buy practices in the past. She believes practice ownership is important for the profession. Owning a few small practices will give a considerable boost to the income a vet can expect to earn.

One of the issues that has arisen with the gender imbalance among vets is a lack of women taking rural jobs. As is the case with the medical profession, few vets want to work in small towns. Neutze believes this is of crucial importance for our livestock and biosecurity and she calls on the government to offer more scholarships with a rural job at the end of the degree.

One of the perceived difficulties for women working in rural practices is the amount of physical work involved in handling large animals, although technology has developed in the past 30 years to create ways for women to handle large animals safely, using chemical and safety restraints.

Taylor says managing the occupational health and safety risks has always been an argument against women entering rural practice but there has been a shift away from expecting vets to go out and do something dramatic to a large animal without any help.

“Men were injured in the same way women were in the past when they tried to do something without adequate restraint. It’s about being a sustainable professional; you don’t want to be a cowboy,” she says.

There are also potential occupational health and safety risks for women in their child-bearing years, who may be exposed to bacteria from a sick animal that could harm a foetus.

Neutze says the industry is keenly aware of the risks to its female vets and there are very few cases of illness occurring.

While Taylor says some older men in the profession see the feminisation of the industry as a potential problem, there has been no attempt at the university level to counteract it or to promote more male students into the degree.

“I think it’s really important for the profession to get the most caring and compassionate people who are going to lead the industry forward in areas that will have the greatest impact on our society in the future,” Taylor says.

“As long as they come out with a good education and a range of skills, male, female it doesn’t matter.”