Women Outnumber Men in Study of Veterinary Medicine

Dr. Mary Beth Leininger, her face wet with kisses from the white terrier puppy she is about to vaccinate, remembers when women were vastly outnumbered by men in veterinary schools.

Now, she says, the pendulum is swinging the other way. Just ask the current Miss America, Debbye Turner, who soon will join the ranks of women attending to the medical needs of the nation’s pets and livestock.

Leininger and her veterinarian husband, Dr. Steven Leininger, own and operate an animal hospital in this Detroit suburb. She is one of about 10,000 women veterinarians in the U nited States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Assn.

She has been in practice more than 20 years. Her 1967 class at Purdue University, with seven women, was about 93% male. Openings in veterinary schools were scarce then, and few women were accepted.

“The thought was, they are taking the place of a man who would practice all his life,” she says. “That certainly has not been borne out. All seven women who were in my class are still working in the profession.”

Women now outnumber men in the nation’s 27 veterinary colleges, said Dr. John Tasker, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University.

The turning point came in 1983, when 50.1% of the applicants were women, Tasker said. The next year, for the first time, the first-year class had more women than men. The proportion of women in first-year studies has risen every year since, to 58.9% in 1988.

Of 8,751 students enrolled in U.S. colleges of veterinary medicine in 1987, 55%, or 4,816, were women. If the trend continues, the profession could be one of the first to change from being predominantly male to predominantly female.

The number of women now being trained as veterinarians is extraordinary, said Dr. Dee Jacobson, a veterinarian in Berkeley, Calif., who is president of the 400-member Assn. for Women Veterinarians (founded in the 1940s).

“The profession is just beginning to acknowledge the tremendous shift that has occurred,” said Jacobson, a 1967 graduate of Cal State Davis.

Women in the field got some added exposure last September, when Debbye Turner, a senior studying veterinary medicine at the University of Missouri, was crowned Miss America for 1990.

Turner estimated that about half the students in her class are women. She said the salary gap between men and women veterinarians also has been narrowing.

“I didn’t pursue veterinary medicine to get rich, and anyone who does that is a disillusioned person,” Turner said. “It is a profession based on compassion. That was my motivation. I loved animals.”

Turner said she chose her career field at the age of 13, when she spent the summer “shadowing” a veterinarian. She says she will not forsake her studies, even for a lucrative modeling contract or a job delivering the evening news on TV.

The average starting salary for a veterinarian was $22,181 in 1988, according to a survey by J. Karl Wise of Schaumburg, Ill.

Wise, whose findings were published this year in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Assn., reported that the average starting salary is about 29% higher than in 1980, but only slightly higher after inflation is figured in.

The average annual pay for a veterinarians in private practice in 1987 was $52,643; veterinarians who specialize in treating horses earned an average of $60,653.

Jacobson contends that stagnating salaries in veterinary medicine caused male students to pursue other, higher-paying biomedical jobs. Brilliant women students, who are often less concerned with earning potential than men, filled the gap.

The number of applicants to veterinary medical colleges fell 43% between 1980 and 1988; this year, it is down to 1.79 applicants per place.

“Getting in is the easiest it has been since World War II,” said Billy Hooper, executive director of the Assn. of American Veterinary Medical Colleges.

Dr. Paul Dieterlen, in practice with a partner in Napanee, Ind., said he has watched the number of veterinarians dwindle.

The last time he sought to recruit a recently graduated veterinarian for his practice, he said, he wrote to veterinary colleges at Iowa State, Ohio State, Michigan State, Illinois and Purdue. The response to his offer of a $26,000-a-year job was disappointing, he said.

Dieterlen said that a male graduate of Purdue eventually filled the opening, but only with a clause in the contract that his wife, also a veterinarian, would get some part-time work. That was fine with him.

“They are saving our skin,” he said. “If we didn’t have the women in veterinary medicine we’d have half the students we have now, or we’d have less-qualified men. They are going to be a major force.”