#HeforShe for Vets

If you have been on the internet in the last few days then you’ve seen Emma Watson’s inspiring and poignant speech in her new role as a goodwill ambassador for UN women. In her speech she calls out for men to take up their end of the bargain in the fight for female equality and empowerment. It’s an inspiring speech and if you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it here. After signing up to the #heforshe pledge I started thinking to myself what role sexism played in my life and I kept coming back to my place as a future veterinarian.

 Anybody in vet school across the world can attest to the fact that more females are entering the profession than ever before. In my class alone, 85% of the students are female, and this is universal across western countries with a similar trend across the rest of the world. This is in stark contrast to the male-dominated profession that has been the norm historically. There are a whole assortment of theories as to why this is the case, and these range from increased academic commitment of females to more males pursuing high-income professions. In the end though the ‘why’ isn’t the important part, it’s how it’s approached which is the issue.

 I remember that in my first years of vet school, on visits to clinics in regional Australia, that I was treated differently to the female student I conducted the visits with. It wasn’t every clinic, and it certainly wasn’t every vet, but it was enough to be noticed. Comments like ‘Geez it’s great to see some male vet students coming through’ were fine – we are definitely few and far between! It was comments like ‘you had better pull this calf instead’ (when my partner had grown up on a dairy farm and was definitely far better at pulling calves than I was -and still is) that really stuck out. When it REALLY got uncomfortable was when I heard numerous theories about the failure of the profession due to there being too many women unable to run businesses. As a young student I listened to these comments come from good vets, employers, pillars of their communities, and I found it more perplexing

 The two main reasons that are given for why male vets are better are that they are better at relating to farmers (majority male), and that they are better suited to physical work with large animals. After half a decade of spending time with vets, and most of my life dealing with farmers I can tell you that the farmers who don’t like dealing with female vets are the farmers who have never dealt with a female vet. Beyond heading to the same bathroom at the pub on a Friday there’s very little that male vets have more in common with male farmers than female vets. Female vets play sport, drink beer, don’t mind getting dirty on a hard days work, and love the land every bit as much as male vets. The only issue you might come across is if you complain about missing the latest episode of the Bachelor, but that has nothing to do with your gender, and everything to do with your taste in TV.

As for the physical work with large animals, there’s really only one thing to say, and I’ll pose it as a question: What’s an extra 15 kilograms to a 1 tonne bull?

Despite this I still come across, and will continue to come across, sexism in the vet profession. As a male I am more employable, can earn more money (mean salary in the US is $112,000 compared to $88,000 for females – much lower for both in Australia), and am more likely to enter into a practice partnership or ownership. All of this is despite the fact that there are plenty of females in my course who will make better veterinarians than I could ever hope to be. It’s because I’m a male, and it’s because of inequality

As a profession we’ve come a long way from Belle Bruce Reid, the first female veterinarian to graduate from Melbourne University in 1906, but we’ve still got a long way to go. As Emma said in her speech “if not me, who? If not now, when?” So, what are your plans for combatting inequality in the vet profession?