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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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My broad understanding is that when male only places begin to allow female membership they tend to disappear a decade later. I read an interesting paper in the last year that when a college major gets about something like 30-50% female it then quickly becomes 100% female. Biology did this. Veterinary science did this. I think Law will survive but it’s going thru this process now.

I think cases like these just reflect the changes in the real world impact these fields have. A veterinarian used to treat animals that were used for producing food and raw materials, but now most vets treat small dogs with hereditary deformities that are useless for anything significant. Men realized this and switched to other fields with more advantageous bargaining positions.

So when a field is slowly becoming irrelevant, men start to slowly abandon it and the share of women increases, and when the share of women is at 30%-50% then we are on the verge of total collapse and very soon all men will leave and only the women remain.

Locally, they are desperate for large-animal veterinarians. The graduate pool is overwhelmingly (80%+) women, and disproportionately (relative to demand) focused on cute pets instead of agricultural animals.

Of course, there are no efforts to reduce this lack of diversity.

And then the fact that large-animal vets end up both being disproportionately male (relative to the field as a whole) and getting paid more gets blamed on male privilege so women can be "oppressed" even in a field where they are the overwhelming majority...

Surprised there isn't sufficient horse girls population to produce large animal female Veterinarians. I had a graduate who was a Dressage rider and some of the things she'd casually tell me about horse maintenance/ownership were 'oh god ew' to me and she seemed to have a lot of other intelligent girls in her social network who were hands on with it all.

Large animal veterinary care is not only gross, it is dangerous, and most of it is not pets, it is livestock.

Don't horses fit better into the 'livestock' category than the 'pet' category to begin with? They can be pretty dangerous as well.

I don't think most of the horses that are still kept in any Western country are kept to serve as lifestock.

Yeah, but I understood to argument to be "being a vet is not about cute little animals, but big bulky ones", horses, whether or not you officially classify them as livestock, are more similar to cows when it comes to maintenance than they are to cats or dogs, and girls who are into horseback riding will already be familiar with that type of animal.

I would compare the average horse that is kept anywhere in the West to large dog breeds: big, heavy and potentially dangerous, basically kept as a pet i.e. for the entertainment of the owner, and not for any economic role.

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