Sexual Discrimination in Medicine
Dr Vernon Coleman
Back in 1974 it was decided that there must, in future, be the same number of female doctors as there are male doctors. There is no law ruling that there should be as many male nurses, models or ballet dancers as there are female nurses, models or ballet dancers but there is a rule that there must be as many women doctors as there are men doctors. It was decided that this absurd and extraordinarily sexist law would be enforced by introducing sexual discrimination into medical school selection policies. More female students were accepted than male students. As a result, well over half of all new medical students are now female. The aim is not just to produce as many women doctors as male doctors but to make the total number of women doctors equal to the total number of male doctors. Since there have traditionally been far more male doctors than female doctors, the changes are being made quickly and dramatically by training more women than men. Forcing medical schools to take a greater percentage of girls than boys has been disastrous; there are always fewer girls than boys applying and so medical schools have struggled to match their quotas. Moreover, there are far fewer women who genuinely want to be doctors – and students who aren't driven by a real vocation make terrible doctors. Naturally, no one dares protest about this obscene and dangerous example of sexual discrimination, despite the fact that it is producing very real problems. The decree that medical students should be selected not according to vocation or intellect but according to chromosome resulted in massive changes to the whole philosophy of medical care and, allied to the changes in working hours introduced as a result of legislation introduced by the European Union, destroyed the concept of continuity of care. I have no doubt that the insistence that medical schools give preference to women is one of the fundamental reasons for the deterioration in the quality of medical care. Women doctors want to work part-time; they want to be home when their children come in from school, they want to be there to make tea, they don't want to work at nights or at weekends or on bank holidays. They want to have a year off every time they have a baby. The result is that most female GPs prefer to work only part of the time. And so the average working week of a GP is now 23 hours. And it was largely because female GPs didn’t want to do house visits or out of hours calls that GPs stopped providing 24 hour cover for 365 days a year. This change has destroyed health care by putting pressure on hospitals (particularly Accident and Emergency Departments which must now do the work previously done by GPs) and on ambulances. I find it rather difficult to believe that the people who insisted that the number of women doctors should be massively increased did not foresee this problem.
NOTE
The essay above is taken from Vernon Coleman’s new book `The End of Medicine’. For more details, and to purchase a copy please CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman May 2025
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