Feminism in medical world a prescription for disaster

July 09 2008 04:48 AM

'In 1975, one in every 20 doctors who graduated from GP training schemes in the Republic was a woman. By 2003, according to a Trinity College training survey, 70pc of GP graduates were female. An old problem, gender imbalance in the medical profession, may have been rectified."

Thus runs an editorial in yesterday's 'Irish Times'; and no doubt to the liberal mind, a 70:30 ratio in favour of female graduates is actually gender balance. To be sure, the editorial admits, several paragraphs later, that the ratio between women and men was tilted -- a nice word to describe the above ratio, but the overall impression was nonetheless created that a historic injustice has been, well, 'rectified'.

Now, are you looking for an example of how the feminist agenda is wrecking Irish institutions? Take one step forward, the Irish medical profession! For years -- and long before the recent TCD survey by Professor Fergus O'Kelly -- we have known that the feminisation of the medical profession was creating a long-term disaster.

But no one dared deal with the issue in public, least of all journalists, the most ideologically 'liberal' of all professional groups, for whom, apparently, 2.3/1 = 1. Because interviews are seen as 'sexist', medical schools are obliged to demand the highest number of points in the Leaving Cert, which is taken at an age when girls are overwhelmingly superior to boys.

For the boy is not out of his intellectual chrysalis when he sits his Leaving Cert; the girl is flapping her lovely butterfly wings in the sunlight. We know this is a temporary phenomenon, related to the difference in the processes of maturation.

Other differences will unfold over the next 10 years which are overwhelmingly to the advantage of men. But any assessment of future medical students on their long-term potential or professional intent, would be vigorously opposed by those ridiculous, yet deeply sinister feminist-agenda quangos which are subsidised by the Department of Justice.

Moreover, overall, boys and girls do not belong to the same species of medical Lepidoptera; he-doctors are usually doctors for life, she-doctors are not, as a survey four years ago by two women doctors, Davida La Harpe and Fiona Graham, first revealed.

Their investigations of women GP graduates from between 1995 and 2001 showed that only 10pc intended to remain on as full time GPs. Yes, just one in 10. Which is bad -- and it could actually be far worse.

Because only two thirds of women graduates invited to participate in the survey actually did so: the other one third did not reply.

Had they already left the profession? The worst-case scenario is therefore as follows: only 6pc of GP she-graduates will be practising as full-time GPs in the long-term.

The La Harpe/Graham survey then showed that of the she-graduates who filled in the questionnaire, 13pc had already left the profession -- essentially, while in their 20s. Another one -third had ceased full-time time work. Some 40pc were already intending to abandon out-office hours, and 80pc said they would never work as a single GP in rural areas.

This is not a health system; it is a first day on the Somme. A large part of our medical schools output are casualties to retirement or part-time work within 10 years of their becoming doctors. But there is no native spare capacity to make good this shortfall: We only have enough medical places to supply our needs. But too many of these places are not being taken by serious would-be doctors, but by frivolous show-offs, who, having grabbed so many vital places in medical school, thereby revealing to the world how very clever they are, then abandon the profession totally, or in part.

The Harpe-Graham response to the crisis was itself utterly girlish: It was that the entire medical profession (and presumably the sick) must re-arrange itself around the requirements of the rising army of part-time she-doctors.

Which is rather like saying the moon should rearrange itself around the requirements of Cape Canaveral.

Well, if things continue as they are, when one of you former she-doctors falls into labour at 5 am, you'll find the midwives and obstetricians are all girls too, so the hospitals are empty.

Or maybe, you hope you can depend on the tiny handful of male doctors which our educational system, no doubt by some regrettable oversight, still produces. But those fine fellows cannot plug the huge gaps left by the mass exodus of women from a profession which they had prevented so many lads from entering in the first place.

So how are the holes in our medical system to be filled? By immigrants from 'developing' countries, of course.

No doubt their native lands consider the loss of those graduates, educated at colossal expense by impoverished socities which are crying our for more doctors, a price well worth paying, merely so that Emma and Naomi and Jessica could prove that, aged 18, they were so much smarter than their male-contemporaries.

And with this triumph achieved, they then abandon the surgery, and high-tail it for Brown Thomas -- another victory for the feminist agenda!

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Feminism in medical world a prescription for disaster

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