James L Nuzzo: “Sex of Health and Medical Degree Earners in the United States.”

Interesting. In the UK, medical schools have admitted two women for every man for the past 50 years. The negative consequences are only too obvious.

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One thought on “James L Nuzzo: “Sex of Health and Medical Degree Earners in the United States.”

  1. The position in the UK is more extremely unequal than in the USA. I suspect the reason is that the associated careers in the UK are predominantly either in the public services or publicly funded. Consequently there is little of the “bottom line” in terms of effectiveness or efficiency in the UK. So it is perfectly rational for women to choose such career paths if their goal is to have well renumerated work that has very generous terms and conditions. In effect Catherine Hakim’s “preference theory”. The Swedes in particular did a lot of research on this in the previous decade. Unsurprisingly they found their increasingly “sex segregated” workforce reflected females making rational choices to enter sector and employers which offered generous “family friendly” working practices and shifts and in which prolonged absences for maternity, carers leave or “sabbaticals” are quite usual. This is of course great for the women working in such sectors, not so great for “customers”, but of course their requirements can be ignored where the funding for their jobs doesn’t reflect the customer, but the power of government to extract tax income.

    So not only are there all the extra helps (bursaries etc), in group preferencing, often unlawful “positive action” involved but also obviously sensible choices if one wants a career that is still well renumerated if one wants to work part time (in general “full time” work in Sweden’s female dominated public services is 10 hours less in its male dominated private sector). One very obvious result is that the UK NHS has a “crisis” every Christmas and new year period because it meets maximum demand at its minimum actual staffing levels because so many are “off”. Similar issues occur during school holidays and specially in August. And of course it is in female dominated sectors of national and local public services that we see the spreading “four days in work for five days pay” pattern of work. There being no consequence in Cambridgeshire, for instance, for a resultant reduction in customer satisfaction following such generosity to workers( actually shown in the evaluation research but ignored in favour of that showing workers are happier) because the longer wait times and queues do not result in reductions in income as “customers” go elsewhere. So it makes perfect sense for those wanting “work life balance” to target these sectors able to deliver on this.

    So those countries with the most widespread public sector ownership and/or funding are in the lead with “occupational segregation” by sex.

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