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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3196 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 25, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is such a lopsided sex ratio usual for a medical university?

It is so bad that some disciplines (ex: Peds) have an explicit and public pro male affirmative action for residency

Yes. It's almost universal at this point. Even when I entered med school (ten years ago? What the fuck), it was already 45:55 in favor of women in India. I recall seeing something like 40:60 in the States today, and even higher in the UK.

I'm not sure how much of it is affirmative action (it's too common to be the decisive factor), and how much of it is women just being better at maintaining good grades and grinding at exams. In some fields like gynecology, younger male doctors are on the verge of being endangered. Only a few branches, like orthopedics, remain solidly male. I don't know a single female urologist, though I'm sure they exist.

At least in germany, medicine as a whole has been 60%+ female, tendency upwards. Specialty study programs tend to be similarly, or even more lopsided: I studied a special "applied math in biology and medicine" course, which was around 20 women to 4 guys (admittedly partially due to many guys dropping out in the first semester). Women don't like math, but at least a few are good at it, and if you give it a focus on something they actually do like... The same goes for several specialty courses we have here on medical / biophysics or -informatics, even engineering, all of which naively may sound male-dominated, but from my impression were also 60%+ female. Just attach "medical" (or "media", for that matter) to any course name, and the women will flock to you, apparently.

Then you have the degrees which used to be Ausbildung, such as midwifery, and some other such as nutritional biology, which combine very low standards and a lopsided gender ratio.

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