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The Competitive Landscape of

Medical School

ack then getting into medical school wasn’t as competitive as it is today.
BFor the Meds’ 63 class, there were 48 spots, but only 47 students showed
up by Labour Day. Eventually a 48th student was found. That’s hard to imagine
now, with thousands applying for limited spots. The gender disparity in
medicine at the time was striking.

Our class had four women, and that number seemed consistent with the
years before and after us. However, not long before my time, Queens actively
discouraged women from entering medicine. Indeed, there were no women at
Queen’s medical school from 1888 until the late 1940s.There’s a documented
case about 1950 where the school sent representatives to convince a female
applicant that medicine wasn’t appropriate for women.

Fortunately, this attitude shifted significantly, and by the time I joined the
faculty at McMaster University 15 years later, women made up half of the
medical school class.

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