Monday, November 25, 2013

Can Society Afford Educated Woman?

Today increasing numbers of women doctors  decide to work part time or leave the profession. Since 2005 the part-time physician workforce has expanded by 62 percent, according to recent survey data from the American Medical Group Association, with nearly 4 in 10 female doctors between the ages of 35 and 44 reporting in 2010 that they worked part time. 
This may seem like a personal decision, but it has serious consequences for patients and the public.Medical education is supported by federal and state tax money both at the university level — student tuition doesn’t come close to covering the schools’ costs — and at the teaching hospitals where residents are trained. So if doctors aren’t making full use of their training, taxpayers are losing their investment. With a growing shortage of doctors in America, we can no longer afford to continue training doctors who don’t spend their careers in the full-time practice of medicine.
Tremendous amounts of economic and social effort have gone into the promotion of the educated woman and the more gender-diverse workforce. Tremendous amounts of real capital have gone into the promotion and education of women, the goal being to bring them fully up to par with men in both ability and opportunity.
Are we getting a good return on that investment? This is a question feminists do not want to hear about, but how long can it be avoided?
Society is, collectively, making a gargantuan investment in educating college students with the hope that there will be some return on that investment. That return doesn’t have to come in the form of capital, but rather in productivity: those receiving these extravagantly expensive educations are expected use them in order to enhance their performance in professional fields. Said enhancement leads to better performance of professional fields as a whole (ex: a larger number of competent doctors, lawyers, investors and the like available to a larger share of the population), and that in turn leads to a better society.
The problem here is that men are offering a greater return on that investment than their equally well educated female counterparts.

Society Can’t Afford The Educated Woman


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