Category: Learning & Education

Veterinary medicine shifts to more women, fewer men; pattern will repeat in medicine, law fields

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 1, 2010

Women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, says sociologist Anne E. Lincoln.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

Her study is the first of its kind to analyze the feminization of veterinary medicine from the perspective of examining the pool of applicant data to U.S. veterinary medical colleges from 1975 to 1995, Lincoln said.

As of 2010, the veterinary profession is about 50 percent men and 50 percent women, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, while enrollment in veterinary medical colleges is about 80 percent women.

Departure from convention; new methodology
Conventional occupational research identifies a flip in the gender make-up of a profession by looking at the number of men and women who get hired into that profession, Lincoln said. The current study broke with that convention and instead measured the number of male and female applicants to veterinary medical colleges.

In looking at the applicants for each year, the study controlled for variables that could be a factor: class size, proportion of women on faculty, proportion of women in the classroom, increased tuition and declines in the profession’s average salary. Lincoln found no evidence that any of those factors was statistically significant in explaining why more women than men are applying, she said.

By quantifying the number of men and women attempting to enter veterinary medical colleges the study could determine whether feminization is caused by gender bias in the acceptance process. Lincoln found no evidence of acceptance bias.

Study finds preemptive flight; challenges long-held notions about women
“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools,” Lincoln said. “So perhaps a young male student says he’s going to visit a veterinary medical school, and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate.”

The study puts to rest the long-held notion that men are more concerned than women about the cost of tuition and salaries when choosing a professional field, according to Lincoln.

“There’s always been this notion for any field that feminizes that women don’t care about salaries because they have a husband’s earnings to fall back on,” Lincoln said. “But this study found that men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries, and that what’s really driving feminization of the field is what I call ‘preemptive flight’ — men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment. Also, fewer men than women are graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, so they aren’t applying because they don’t have the prerequisites.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics reports that for the academic year 1980-81, the number of men and women earning Bachelor’s degrees was about the same, around 460,000. From that year on, however, the number of women earning a Bachelor’s increased much faster than the number of men. For 2009-10, 811,000 women earned Bachelor’s degrees, compared to 562,000 men.

First study of its kind to look at college applicant data
Lincoln’s findings are reported online in “The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education” in the international journal Social Forces. For a link to the journal abstract and more information, see www.smuresearch.com.

The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges made available data from its annual, confidential survey of all U.S. veterinary medical colleges for Lincoln to analyze.

The data represented the applications to each of the 27 veterinary medical colleges in existence in the United States from 1975 to 1995. After 1995, veterinary schools implemented substantially different application procedures, making comparisons between pre- and post-1995 data unviable for this study.

Title IX removed barriers to women in vet med
In 1960, the U.S. Census reported that the field of veterinary medicine was 98 percent male, Lincoln found. For the academic year 1969-70, the national average for veterinary medical college male enrollment was 89 percent.

Veterinary medicine began to shift after the 1972 passage of Title IX, the federal amendment that prohibits discrimination against female students. The amendment forever altered the way vet med colleges responded to female applicants, Lincoln said.

“I found that after 1972, when the barriers to entry were dropped, women began enrolling in larger numbers,” Lincoln said. “Male applicants dropped sharply after 1976, the first year that applicant statistics were collected.”

Vet med shifts in 50 years from 98 percent male to 50-50
By 2008-09, the national average for veterinary medicine male enrollment had declined to 22.4 percent. Cornell University’s enrollment, for example, is currently more than 80 percent female, according to the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges.

“It’s really remarkable that in the past 50 years the pendulum has swung the other direction. Today the profession is 50-50,” she said. “It takes time for the men to cycle out. But because the number of women enrolled has been greater than the number of men since 1984, there’s been a wave of women entering the profession.”

“That’s why this study is really pushing the boundaries,” Lincoln said. “This is an occupation that is changing even as I analyze it, so I can watch it as it’s changing. Indications are that it will continue to shift even further toward women, beyond the current 50-50.”

Feminization likely for law, medicine professions
The same phenomenon likely will be seen in coming years in the male-dominated fields of medicine and law, given the increasing numbers of women now entering those fields.

“We can use veterinary medicine as a predictor of what is going to happen in medicine and law,” Lincoln said. “It may take 27 years for medicine and law to become gender-integrated. The pharmacist profession earlier experienced this ‘occupational jostling.’ It takes decades for a profession to feminize because an occupation that is mostly male is going to have generational turnover as the more senior practitioners retire.” — Margaret Allen

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Mind & Brain

Abusive mothers improve their parenting after home visits, classes and emotional support from therapists

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 26, 2010

Mothers who live in poverty and who have abused their children can stop if they are taught parenting skills and given emotional support.

A new study has found that mothers in families in which there is a history of child abuse and neglect were able to reduce how much they cursed at, yelled at, slapped, spanked, hit or rejected their children after a series of home visits from therapists who taught them parenting skills.

There were large improvements in mothers’ parenting in families that received the intensive services, compared to families that did not receive the services, according to SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, two of the study’s eight authors.

As a result of the intensive, hands-on training, the women in the study said they felt they did a better job managing their children’s behavior, said Jouriles and McDonald. The mothers also were observed to use better parenting strategies, and the families were less likely to be reported again for child abuse.

“Although there are many types of services for addressing child maltreatment, there is very little scientific data about whether the services actually work,” said McDonald. “This study adds to our scientific knowledge and shows that this type of service can actually work.”

Help for violent families
The parenting training is part of a program called Project Support, developed at the Family Research Center at SMU and designed to help children in severely violent families.

The study appears in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Family Psychology. The article is titled “Improving Parenting in Families Referred for Child Maltreatment: A Randomized Controlled Trial Examining Effects of Project Support.” SMU psychologist David Rosenfield also authored the study.

The research was funded by the federal Interagency Consortium on Violence Against Women and Violence Within the Family, along with the Texas-based Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.

“Child maltreatment is such an important and costly problem in our society that it seems imperative to make sure that our efforts — and the tax dollars that pay for them — are actually solving the problem,” said Jouriles. He and McDonald are co-founders and co-directors of the SMU Family Research Center.

In 2007, U.S. child welfare agencies received more than 3 million reports of child abuse and neglect, totaling almost 6 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Poor and single with children
The study worked with 35 families screened through the Texas child welfare agency Child Protective Services, CPS. The parents had abused or neglected their children at least once, but CPS determined it best the family stay together and receive services to improve parenting and end the maltreatment.

In all the families, the mother was legal guardian and primary caregiver and typically had three children. On average she was 28, single and had an annual income of $10,300. Children in the study ranged from 3 to 8 years old.

Half the families in the study received Project Support parenting education and support. The other half received CPS’s conventional services.

New parenting skills + help
Mental health service providers met with the 17 Project Support families weekly in their homes for up to 6 months.

During that time, mothers, and often their husbands or partners, were taught 12 specific skills, including how to pay attention and play with their children, how to listen and comfort them, how to offer praise and positive attention, how to give appropriate instructions and commands, and how to respond to misbehavior.

Also, therapists provided the mothers with emotional support and helped them access materials and resources through community agencies as needed, such as food banks and Medicaid. The therapists also helped mothers evaluate the adequacy and safety of the family’s living arrangements, the quality of their child-care arrangements and how to provide enough food with so little money.

Services provided to families receiving traditional child welfare services varied widely. The range of services included parenting classes at a church or agency, family therapy or individual counseling, videotaped parenting instruction, anger-management help, GED classes and contact by social workers in person or by phone.

Fewer recurrences of abuse
Only 5.9 percent of the families trained through Project Support were later referred to CPS for abuse, compared with almost 28 percent of the control group, the researchers found.

“The results of this study have important implications for the field of child maltreatment,” said SMU’s Rosenfield.

Project Support was launched in 1996 to address the mental health problems of maltreated children and children exposed to domestic violence, both of which often lead to considerable problems for children later in life, such as substance abuse, interpersonal violence and criminal activity. Previous studies have shown the program can improve children’s psychological adjustment as well as mothers’ ability to parent their children appropriately and effectively, according to the researchers.

Project Support: A promising practice
With funding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Project Support has been included in a study evaluating 15 “promising practices” nationally for helping children who live in violent families.

Jouriles is professor and chairman of the SMU Psychology Department. McDonald and Rosenfield are associate professors.

Other researchers were William Norwood, University of Houston; Laura Spiller, Midwestern State University; Nanette Stephens, University of Texas; Deborah Corbitt-Shindler, SMU; and Miriam Ehrensaft, City University of New York.

SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

Tags David Rosenfield, Deborah Corbitt-Shindler, Dedman College, Ernest Jouriles, Renee McDonald, SMU Department of Psychology, SMU Family Research Center

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Researcher news

Research of new Dedman Dean Tsutsui spans Japan’s business, environmental and cultural history

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 14, 2010

Historian and author William M. Tsutsui began work July 1 as the new dean of SMU’s Dedman College, home to the humanities, social sciences, and natural and mathematical sciences.

A specialist in the business, environmental and cultural history of 20th-century Japan, Tsutsui holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Princeton universities. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Palgrave, 2004). He co-edited (with Michiko Ito) In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and has recently completed Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization.”I am honored and thrilled to have been selected as dean of Dedman College,” Tsutsui said when his selection as dean was announced on March 26. “The College has a world-class faculty, talented students, dedicated staff and a broad base of support in the Dallas community. I look forward to working with all these constituencies, and with President Turner and Provost Ludden, to enhance Dedman College’s achievements in teaching, research and public engagement. This is a historic moment for SMU, with a major campaign underway and the university’s centennial at hand, and a time of great opportunity for Dedman College.”

New Dedman role
Dedman College is home to the humanities, social sciences, and natural and mathematical sciences as well as the general education program that all students follow before declaring a major.

Tsutsui will take the lead in implementing a new general education program passed by the SMU faculty March 19.

As dean of Dedman College, Tsutsui will head the largest of SMU’s seven colleges and schools, with its more than 250 full-time faculty members, including 23 endowed professorships. About 40 percent of SMU’s undergraduates pursue their majors in Dedman College through more than 50 baccalaureate degree programs and their minors in more than 50 areas. Eighteen graduate programs in Dedman College lead to a master’s degree and 12 programs lead to a doctor of philosophy degree.

Tsutsui previously was associate dean for international studies and a professor of history at the University of Kansas. He also was director of the Kansas Consortium for Teaching About Asia in KU’s Center for East Asian Studies.

Degrees from Princeton, Oxford, Harvard
Tsutsui received a Ph.D. in history at Princeton University in 1995 and a Master of Arts in history there in 1990. He received a Master of Letters in Modern Japanese History from Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College in 1988 and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies in 1985.

Tsutsui also is the author of Banking Policy in Japan: American Efforts at Reform During the Occupation (Routledge, 1988) and Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (Princeton University Press, 1998). In addition, he is the editor of Banking in Japan (Routledge, 1999) and A Companion to Japanese History (Blackwell, 2007).

Awards for history research
He received the 1997 Newcomen Society Award for Excellence in Business History Research and Writing, the 2000 John Whitney Hall Prize awarded by the Association of Asian Studies for best book on Japan or Korea published in 1998, and the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award for non-fiction.

Tsutsui was a featured speaker July 10 at Chicago’s annual G-Fest, the world’s largest gathering of scholars and fans of Godzilla.

Prior to his positions as KU associate dean for international studies and a professor of history, Tsutsui was acting director of KU’s Center for East Asian Studies and executive director of its Confucius Institute. He was named faculty fellow at KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, received a William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2001 and won KU’s Steeples Service to Kansas Award in 2001.

Tsutsui is married to Marjorie Swann, director of the Museum Studies Program and the Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. She will be joining SMU as well.

Tags Dedman College, SMU Department of History, William M. Tsutsui

Health & Medicine Learning & Education Mind & Brain

Déjà Vu research pushes around memory, creates illusion of past encounter

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 19, 2009

Brown%2C%20Alan2%206-19-09%20photoshopped.jpg

A new study by research psychologists Alan S. Brown of SMU and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University provides new clues about déjà vu, that eerie sense of experiencing a moment for the second time.

These clues, in turn, could help unlock the secrets of the human brain.

“Déjà vu is inappropriate behavior by the brain,” says Brown, professor in SMU’s Department of Psychology and a leading researcher on memory. “By shedding light on this odd phenomenon, we can better understand normal memory processes.”

Published in the May issue of “Psychological Science,” the study significantly extends research on the déjà vu theory of “double perception,” which suggests that a quick glance at a scene can make it appear strangely familiar when it is fully perceived moments later.

“This is easy to imagine in today’s distracted society,” Brown says. “Let’s say you enter a new museum, glancing at artwork while talking on your cell phone. Upon hanging up, you look around and sense you’ve been there long ago.”

According to double perception theory, the initial glance created a mushy memory without time-space context, Brown says. “When you then consciously register the scene, the brain connects the two memories — and you get that spooky feeling.”

Brown and Marsh re-created this experience in the laboratory using unique symbols. In their trials, a symbol was flashed at a subliminal level on a computer screen, followed by a longer view of the same or a different symbol, or no symbol.

When a flash was followed by its identical symbol, participants were five times more likely to say they had seen that symbol sometime before the experiment.

“We pushed memory around,” Brown says. “We changed people’s views of their personal past by instilling a false sense of a previous encounter.”

In pushing its participants’ memories to a time and place outside the laboratory, the new study goes beyond the few previous studies of double perception that have been conducted in the past 100 years. Those studies used words or names, rather than symbols.

“Words and names are contaminated because study participants actually could have encountered them before the experiment,” Brown says, “but it’s extremely unlikely that they ever had encountered our symbols. Our study more closely parallels a quick glance at an unfamiliar object in the real world.”

In addition to double perception, researchers have other theories about the cause of déjà vu, which is French for “already seen.” These theories include a brief dysfunction in the brain, such as a seizure, and “episodic familiarity,” when a forgotten memory connects with part of the present experience.

Brown and Marsh tested episodic familiarity in a 2008 study published in “Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,” in which participants were quickly shown photos of college campuses they had never visited. Upon returning to the laboratory several weeks later, they viewed a series of new and old campus photos and judged whether they had been to the locations. The study showed that the initial brief exposure increased participants’ beliefs that they had visited these colleges — when, in fact, they hadn’t.

“Déjà vu is such a rare event, with potentially numerous causes,” Brown says. “If we can nudge people a little bit in that direction, we can learn the mechanisms behind it.” — Sarah Hanan

Tags Alan S. Brown, Dedman College, Elizabeth Marsh, SMU Department of Psychology

Earth & Climate Fossils & Ruins Learning & Education Plants & Animals Researcher news

Louis Jacobs co-writes, consults for international paleo video

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 12, 2008

Vertebrate paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs is scientific consultant and co-writer of a new 33-minute video just released by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

A professor in Dedman College‘s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Jacobs introduces the “We Are SVP” video. An internationally known vertebrate paleontologist, he is a former president of the society.

The video features many other respected paleontologists from around the world, all of them talking about the work they do and its importance to science and society. The goal of the video is to educate students, teachers and the public about vertebrate paleontologists and the importance of their work.

“Because we study fossils, especially dinosaurs, we capture the imagination of children, and that makes vertebrate paleontology a gateway for all science,” Jacobs says in the video.

Also appearing is SMU geology student and SMU President’s Scholar Karen Gutierrez.

The society’s 2,300 members in 54 countries are scientists who study fossils of animals with backbones and complex brains, including dinosaurs.

Vertebrate paleontology’s findings provide the evidence for environmental change and contribute to understanding everything from climate change and evolution to ecology.

“Our field expeditions and our laboratory work provide the evidence for environmental change, including its most serious consequence — extinction,” Jacobs says in the video.

Jacobs joined SMU’s faculty in 1983. Currently he has projects in Mongolia, Angola and Antarctica.

His book, “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (1999, Texas A&M University Press) was the basis of an exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History that traveled the state. He is consulting on a new exhibit, Mysteries of the Texas Dinosaurs, which is set to open in the fall of 2009.

Jacobs is also known for his work documenting changes in fossil mammals in Pakistan, which helps scholars correlate climatic changes with evolutionary changes seen in animals, and which helps calibrate the rate of DNA evolution in mammals. He’s also credited for discovery of what’s now known as Malawisaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in Malawi, Africa, 115 million years ago.

In the early 1980s, Jacobs worked for paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey as head of the division of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya.

The SVP video is narrated by “Law & Order” television star Sam Waterston. The video was produced by longtime New York theater producer Steve Cohen. Executive producer was Ray Marr of Shade Tree Studios in Dallas. Portions of the video were shot at the Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas.

Tags Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Karen Gutierrez, Louis L. Jacobs

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news