a268  1932  20 Jan 90
BC-APN--Women Veterinarians, ADV 04,0917
$Adv04
AGENCIES AND RADIO OUT
For Release Sunday, Feb. 4
From AP Newsfeatures
(APN SUNDAY ILLUSTRATIONS: Mailed print subscribers get 1 b&w photo.)
    
    EDITOR'S NOTE - A profession once dominated by men appears about to
be taken over by women. Women have overtaken men enrolled in the
nation's veterinary schools over the past few years and if the trend
continues they are the ones who will be doing the hiring and firing
in the future.
    
By GRETEL WIKLE
Associated Press Writer
    PLYMOUTH, Mich. (AP) - Dr. Mary Beth Leininger, her face wet from
the kisses of a white terrier puppy she is about to vaccinate,
remembers when women were highly outnumbered by men in veterinary
schools.
    Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Just ask the reigning
Miss America, Debbye Turner, who soon will join the ranks of women
like Leininger tending to the medical needs of the nation's animals.
    Leininger, who owns and operates a veterinary hospital in this
Detroit suburb with her husband, Dr. Steven Leininger, is one of
about 10,000 women veterinarians in the nation, according to the
American Veterinary Medical Association.
    Though Leininger has been a veterinarian for more than 20 years, her
1967 class at Purdue, with its seven women, was typical - about 93
percent male. It was a time when openings in the schools were scarce,
and not many women enrolled.
    ''The thought was, they are taking the place of a man who would
practice all his life,'' she says. ''That certainly has not been
borne out. All seven women who were in my class are still working in
the profession.''
    Women now outnumber men in the nation's 27 veterinary colleges,
according to Dr. John Tasker, dean of the College of Veterinary
Medicine at Michigan State University.
    The trend started in 1983 when 50.1 percent of the applicants were
women, Tasker says. The next year, for the first time, the entering
class had more women than men. The percentage of first-year women
students has increased every year since, reaching 58.9 percent in
1988.
    Of 8,751 students enrolled in U.S. colleges of veterinary medicine
in 1987, 55 percent, or 4,816, were women, and 45 percent, or 3,935,
were men. If the trend continues, the profession could become one of
the first to change from being predominantly male to predominantly
female.
    The number of women now being trained as veterinarians is
extraordinary, says Dr. Dee Jacobson, a veterinarian in Berkeley,
Calif., and president of the 400-member Association for Women
Veterinarians founded in the 1940s.
    ''The profession is just beginning to acknowledge the tremendous
shift that has occurred,'' says Jacobson, a 1967 graduate of
California State University at Davis.
    Women in the veterinary profession got some added exposure in
September when Debbye Turner, a senior studying veterinary medicine
at the University of Missouri in Columbia, was named Miss America.
    Turner, who estimates that about half the students in her class are
women, says the salary gap between men and women veterinarians also
has begun to close.
    ''I didn't pursue veterinary medicine to get rich, and anyone who
does that is a disillusioned person,'' Turner says. ''It is a
profession based on compassion. That was my motivation. I loved
animals.''
    Turner says she decided to become a veterinarian after she spent a
summer ''shadowing a veterinarian'' as a 13-year-old. And she says
she won't forsake her ambition, even for a lucrative modeling
contract or a job delivering the evening news on TV.
    The average starting salary for veterinarians was $22,181 a year in
1988, according to a survey by J. Karl Wise of Schaumburg, Ill.
    Wise, whose study was published this year in the Journal of the
American Veterinary Medical Association, reported that the average
starting salary is about 29 percent higher than in 1980, but is only
slightly higher after inflation is figured in.
    The average annual salary for veterinarians in private practice in
1987 was $52,643, with veterinarians specializing in horses earning
an average of $60,653.
    Jacobson contends that stagnant salaries among veterinarians caused
potential male students to seek other higher-paying biomedical jobs.
Bright women students, who traditionally are less concerned with
salary, filled the gap.
    The size of the applicant pool for veterinary medical college
decreased 43 percent between 1980 and 1988, and this year it's down
to 1.79 applicants per position.
    ''Getting in is the easiest it's been since World War II,'' says
Billy Hooper, executive director of the Association of American
Veterinary Medical Colleges.
    Dr. Paul Dieterlen in Napanee, Ind., where he and his partner take
care of large and small animals, has watched the number of
veterinarians shrink.
    The last time he went looking to hire a newly graduated veterinarian
he wrote to the veterinary medical colleges at Iowa State, Ohio
State, Michigan State, Illinois and Purdue. The response for the
$26,000-a-year job, Dieterlen says, was disappointing.
    Dieterlen says a male Purdue graduate eventually filled the opening,
but one of the agreements in the contract was that his wife, also a
veterinarian, would get to do some part-time work. That was fine with
him.
    ''They are saving our skin,'' he says. ''If we didn't have the women
in veterinary medicine we'd have half the students we have now, or
we'd have less-qualified men. They are going to be a major force.''
    END ADV
    
 
AP-NY-01-20-90 2213EST
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