I’m a big admirer of the entrepreneur Hilary Devey, who’s been in the press of late talking a lot of sense about women in the world of work. She’s mentioned in a Daily Telegraph article today (link at the end of this piece). What would the response of the government be, if male doctors worked 25% less than female doctors? We can be very sure they’d do all in their power to train fewer male doctors and more female doctors. But give the reality is that female doctors work so much less than male doctors, British citizens are being assaulted both as taxpayers (financing the training of many more female doctors, to make up for the lesser time they devote to work) and as patients (experiencing a poorer service from the NHS).
Female doctors have traditionally been keener than male doctors to go into general practise, and a little over 50% of GPs are now women – the proportion continues to rise year-on-year. Given that many of these women eventually give up working altogether (due to supportive male partners), or work part-time (whether or not because of caring responsibilities), and are far less likely than men to work unsocial hours or visit patients at their homes, the GP service is in crisis in the UK.
The article presents a stark picture:
At the moment, just over half of registered doctors are men, but it is predicted that women will overtake them in less than five years. A 15-year follow-up of doctors after graduation showed that on average, after career breaks and part-time working are taken into account, women work 25 per cent less than their male counterparts. The problem, put starkly, is that the average male medical graduate will work full-time, while the average female won’t. This means that the state will get more man-hours out of a male graduate than a female graduate.
The ‘bottom line’ here?
To deliver the same work output, the taxpayer can finance the expensive training of either three male doctors, or four female doctors.
The article:
It’s good to see the Telegraph, a paper to which I subscribed for many years until Simon Heffer departed for the Daily Mail, starting to print more sense about the dire impact of feminist-inspired social engineering programmes on British society. I predict we’ll see more of this over time in our more serious newspapers and periodicals.
