“We joke around about it and we give the guys a hard time,” second-year veterinary medical student Heather Grodi said. “We just give them a hard time about being surrounded by women.”

About 87 percent of students in the College of Veterinary Medicine — Michigan’s only veterinary school — are women. In Grodi’s class of 109 students, 95 are women.

The numbers reflect a trend that began sometime in the 1980s and has been noted nationwide.

“It’s been a gradual shift from pretty much 100 percent men on its way to 100 percent women,” said Karlene Belyea, executive director of the Michigan Veterinary Medical Association, or MVMA. “It’s definitely a shift.”

In March, the American Veterinary Medical Association, or AVMA, announced the number of female veterinarians in the U.S. had surpassed the number of male veterinarians for the first time in history. The shift came in 2009, with 44,802 female veterinarians and 43,196 male veterinarians, according to AVMA data.

Until 2008, men outnumbered women in the field.

“This profession is going to be looking a lot different in 10 years,” Belyea said.

A gradual shift
When John Fyfe entered veterinary school in 1980, his class was about 50 percent women — a number consistent with most schools in the country at the time.

Before the 1980s, the field was 95 percent men, said Dave Sprecher, associate dean for academic programs for the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Fyfe, now a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics in the College of Veterinary Medicine, said the shift likely began in the late 1970s. Veterinary medicine, a field that had been predominantly male because of its roots in the farm, was becoming more evenly distributed between men and women.

“By the time you got to the late ’80s or even the mid-’80s, the classes were mostly women and since then, it’s sort of stayed that way,” Fyfe said.

“There’s always the conservative element in any profession that thought this would be the worst thing that could ever happen. And there’s others of us who thought, ‘What the heck, why should it make any difference at all?’”

Now, the trend isn’t surprising, second-year veterinary medical student Jennifer Stowe said.

“It’s not a secret — it’s to be expected,” she said. “It’s been that way for many years, so no one really thinks about it anymore.”

In 2007, the MVMA hit the 50 percent mark in female to male membership, Belyea said. The MVMA, composed of veterinarians and veterinary students, now has about 54 percent female membership and about 46 percent male membership, she said.

“All of the young vets are women and the older vets are men,” Belyea said. “Twenty years from now, it will be almost all women.”

The trend at MSU
The classes Fyfe now teaches predominantly are filled with women. In his 15 years as a professor at MSU, he’s seen the trend of women outnumbering men firsthand.

“I think our class size for a long time was 100, and we would have between 12 and 16 men — occasionally a few more, seldom less — in the class,” he said. “So it’s a great class for single men.”

During the last five years, enrollment in MSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine has been about 85 percent women, Sprecher said. The class of 2010 has 89 women and 19 men enrolled.

The 2013 class — the most recently enrolled class — was composed of 92 women and 14 men.

“It’s just normal to us in veterinary medicine, so we tend to have discussions about how are we going to increase the population of men,” he said. “It’s kind of different from the discussions that might go on in most fields.”

Dan Cole, a second-year veterinary medical student, said he is one of 13 or 14 men in his class of more than 100. He knew before coming to school that it would be mostly women in the college, but it is noticeable and does affect class dynamics, he said.

“In terms of normality, yeah, this is what’s normal for veterinary school, but it is very strange — it would be strange if it was 80 percent guys,” Cole said. “It’s just not evenly distributed and it’s noticeable.”

The reasons for the trend vary: Maybe men are more motivated by money and choose the higher paying field of human medicine.

Maybe women want a career that will allow them to balance work and family more than human medicine would.

Maybe it’s because women have such a high level of compassion for animals.

Maybe, Fyfe said, it all stems back to Title IX and its breaking down of the barriers that held women back from the educational opportunities men enjoyed.

“I think you could find as many theories and ideas as there were people that you talk to,” Sprecher said.

“I think the profession has not been able to very satisfactorily define why.”

No one seems to know without question why the trend is there.

“I can only guess as to why it is,” Cole said. “I’m not really sure if anybody’s right or if anybody knows what’s happening and I personally can’t tell you.”

Belyea said it’s hard to tell the effects of the trend or whether the percentage of women students will continue to increase, but it is unlikely the number will climb to 100 percent women, she said.

“I think in all professions, it’s good to have a certain level of diversity — men, women, different nationalities. The only downside I can see of it is having (the field) shift to predominantly women,” Belyea said. “I don’t think it will ever go quite to 100 percent. There will always be some men.”

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