Edinburgh’s Veterinary Women

Each year, the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, known to its friends and alumni worldwide as the Dick Vet, welcomes around 170 new students on its Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery (BVM&S) programmes. The five-year course is the typical route for UK school-leavers, with a four-year option available for about 60 graduate entrants, many of them international, who have a first degree in life sciences. Just over 80% of the students at the annual White Coat Ceremony of welcome each year are women, a figure typical of veterinary schools worldwide. The veterinary profession has ‘feminised’, to use a term which first found currency in the international veterinary press in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since mid 20th century, women have been attracted to this profession in steadily increasing numbers and have found careers in all the veterinary disciplines and specialties but, as with medicine, the struggle for true equality of opportunity has not been easy. The history of the early, pioneering veterinary women is less well-known than that of their medical counterparts, and it is fair to say that progress towards gender equality in veterinary medicine experienced a particularly difficult birthing, a dystokia indeed. It is a story in which Edinburgh features prominently.