Female Domination in the Health Care System

As inequity and discrimination have changed throughout time, evolution in the roles of women in medicine has become a part of such change. While medicine has by precedent been predominately governed and practiced by men, a change in this field has begun. Medical schools across the country are populated with more females compared to males for the past two years. While this represents a shift in female equity, Cathy Gulli believes that there are significant consequences relating to this change. In her article, "Where Have All the Men Gone?," Gulli argues that a female dominated medical field would have serious repercussion in terms of available services and political equity. However, although Gulli's points have merit, her argument is seriously hindered by stereotypical generalizations and over reliance on doubtful and misleading statistics in proving her judgments.

Gulli's article focuses on the fact that women will without a doubt become the dominant gender in the field of medicine. She starts off by describing positive outcomes of female dominance by claiming that patients will feel more comfortable and cared for since female doctors are more compassionate and understanding. She explains that there will however be a unilateral shift in leadership towards minority male doctors because females cannot lead or solve issues. The author also focuses on the fact that "female medical students won't pursue specialties such as surgery, which has historically been a male-dominated area of expertise specialties such as surgery" (1). Therefore, while females have no urge to pursue learning and specialization, Gulli think this will result in a decrease in potential medical services in helping the community as a whole. The last negative consequence of female dominance is the shortage of workers, as females "have been shown in the past to work fewer hours" (1). Gulli claims that females have a need for a more balanced life because they think that "to help others, we have to be healthy in our head and body" (1), contrary to males who generally would put career before personal life.

Gulli fails in providing evidence to prove her statement of increasing number of females in medical schools. She claims the doctors in the future will likely be women as she observes "female enrolment [in medical schools] has hit 70 per cent for the last two years, after peaking at a record 80 per cent in 2005" (1). The ratio was gathered from school surveys, but in fact, just by judging the percentage of female population is not enough to support that there are more female students than male students. Gulli only gives a sample of medical schools which have more females. Moreover, there is no exact number to justify this percentage. For instance, although school A has a seventy percent female ratio while school B has forty percent, if school B has a larger population than school A; there could still be more males than females in medical schools. Not only that, Gulli makes a generalization that the majority of doctors will be female from only looking back at the past two to three years. In fact, two to three years in the past is not enough to accurately predict the future. In addition, Gulli's numbers are focused