Real Men Don’t Get Grades (in Canada)
Is affirmative action for men the answer to enrollment woes? In Canada’s medical schools, the predominance of women is seen as another sign of how young men are falling behind academically
For Harold Reiter the tipping point was the entering class of 2002.
As the new chair of admissions at McMaster University’s medical school, he took one look at the proportion of women admitted – a whopping 76.9 per cent – and wondered what had happened to the men.
The gender gap at the university’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine was one of the widest in the country and one of the factors that prompted Dr. Reiter to rethink the admissions criteria.
“It was those very numbers that made me start to look at the breakdown of the applicant pool, in terms of the ratio of male to female, and the discovery of what was, I think, an over-emphasis on grade point average,” he said.
Basing admissions mostly on marks, it seemed, had contributed to the decline of men’s numbers in medical schools. Dr. Reiter, who was new to the position, decided the school should put less emphasis on marks and broaden its requirements, which eventually it did. The proportion of men has since slightly increased…
This item was highlighted in today’s Inside Higher Ed. I did change the British/Canadian spelling of “enrolment” in the headline to “enrollment” in order to, you know, help the male readers. Stand by for music below: