Gender equity achieved — let’s move on

Dave Berry

EDMONTON (The Gateway) — Three in five. In 40 years, when my body starts to break down after years of neglect and bar food, those will be the odds that the doctor responsible for helping me eke out a few more years of unhealthy living will be a woman. That’s because this year, a full 60 per cent of medical graduates in Canada were women. As a matter of fact, two schools, McMaster and the University of Montreal, actually had classes more than three-quarters composed of women.

Now, those numbers might seem fairly nondescript, but they’re actually remarkably important. Medicine, specifically the advanced, non-nursing kind, is not only becoming equal in terms of sexual distribution, it’s becoming tipped towards women. And this isn’t some one-year anomaly, either: last year, 54 per cent of medical grads were women, and of classes that will graduate in the next four years, the number hovers somewhere around the high-50s. In fact, the only province that didn’t graduate more women than men this past year was Alberta, and even that was one student away from a 50-50 split.

And, of course, medicine isn’t the only field in which this is happening. While certain fields — notably engineering, but also law and computing science — remain, for the most part, male-dominated, postsecondary education in general tends to attract more women than men. While the difference isn’t always substantial, it is significant enough that some schools in the U.S., for instance, have actually started admitting males under affirmative action laws due to the overwhelming number of female applicants.

Whatever the reason for this shift in the gender scale, the more important fact is that, after years of speeches, lectures, theories and scholars fighting the good fight, gender parity is, more or less, reached. The fact that women can not only achieve the same levels as men in a traditionally masculine field, but also exceed them greatly, suggests to me that, finally, this is one fight that is pretty much won.

Okay, yes, some people will point to facts like continued wage discrepancies and lack of female authority figures — the popular example being CEOs — as proof that this struggle still isn’t over, but that’s overlooking something. Namely, that the world beyond university walls — particularly the world of power and decision-making — is still a good 30 years behind where we are now.

Our politicians, our CEOs, our experienced pundits and analysts are all people in their 50s and 60s; to put it more bluntly, they would have graduated at the absolute earliest in the mid-70s, an era when feminism was still just burning its training bra, so to speak. Given time, even in as little as 10 years, the graying figures of the elite willfor the most part be incapacitated or dead, and newer, younger, more progressive counterparts will have filled their places — a fair number, I’m willing to bet, women.

What’s more, outside of those backwards pockets of inequity, society — particularly pop culture — has pretty much come around. Yes, there are still plenty of pressures on women to fit certain gender roles, especially regarding attractiveness, but men now face similar stigmas, usually with four inches of muscle attached. I’ll grant, society went the wrong way on this one, but it doesn’t change the fact that things are more or less equal.

And while there will always be slight differences, it’s fairly safe to say that by now, those differences are more or less natural. Given that 60 per cent of medical grads in this country are women, I’m willing to bet that the reason professions like, say, engineering remain the domain of men has a lot more to do with happenstance preferences than a cadre of males denying women access to their iron ring fraternity.

It was long, it was hard and I’m thankful I was only ever on the periphery of it, but I think that, finally, we can pretty much call this a battle won. I’m going to go have a drink to celebrate. And maybe some nachos.

Dave Berry is Managing Editor of the Gateway, the University of Alberta student newspaper.