21 May 2026
In her final year at University of the West of England studying a professional doctorate in business administration, Lindi Nikisi examines the implications for female and male veterinary surgeons and their careers in the first of a two-part article.
Lindi Nikisi
Job Title
Image: ryanking999 / Adobe Stock
There is something quietly remarkable about the UK veterinary profession. In the space of four decades, it has undergone one of the most significant sociodemographic transformations in modern British professional life.
A vocation that was, within living memory, overwhelmingly male – formally closed to women until 1922, culturally resistant to them for decades beyond that – has become one in which women now constitute 57% of all practising veterinary surgeons (RCVS, 2019) and upwards of 80% of recent graduating cohorts. That is a profound shift. It deserves to be understood as such.
And yet, as I have been exploring through doctoral research in organisational behaviour, the demographic transformation of the veterinary workforce raises a question that the profession has not yet fully confronted. It is not, at its heart, a question about fairness, though fairness is clearly at stake. It is a question about fit. Can a profession’s structure – including career paths, leadership hierarchies, work patterns, and cultural expectations – stay effective as its workforce dramatically changes?
This article does not answer that question. The research that will answer it is still in progress. What this article does is lay out, as honestly and carefully as I can, what the existing scholarship tells us about the current state of the profession – and ask, with genuine curiosity rather than predetermined conclusion, where that situation might be leading.
The profession has changed who does the work. Whether it has changed the conditions under which that work is done, and recognised in the same measure, is a more complex question.
Feminisation, as it is understood in the social sciences, refers not only to the quantitative increase of women within an occupation but increasingly to the qualitative and structural character of that shift (Morini, 2007).
In this sense, the feminisation of veterinary medicine is both a statistical fact and an ongoing process – one whose full implications have not yet settled.
The history matters here. The profession was built in explicit association with the demands of agricultural and military life. Horses and livestock. Physical labour. Masculine authority. Women were formally granted permission following the enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919; however, they continued to face informal resistance for many subsequent years.
The first woman recognised by the RCVS, Aleen Cust, had practised for years without official standing before the law caught up with her reality.
The transformation that followed was not the result of a decision taken by the profession. It was the result of women deciding to enter it anyway. Legislation created the opening. Individual determination widened it. Over decades, as veterinary practice shifted from large-animal and equine work toward companion and exotic animal medicine, and as university admissions came to prioritise academic achievement over physical capacity, the demographic composition of the profession changed substantially and, by now, irreversibly.
By 2014, women outnumbered men in clinical practice for the first time (RCVS, 2014). By 2019, they constituted 57% of the workforce. Among new first-time registrants, the proportion of women rose from 67% in 2017 to 78% in 2021 (RCVS, 2021). This is not a trend approaching equilibrium. It is a profession whose future clinical workforce will be, for the foreseeable future, predominantly female.
And yet, as Bonnaud and Fortané (2021) observe, women do not practise with statuses comparable to those of men, regardless of their numerical majority. The transformation in who enters the profession has not been accompanied by a commensurate transformation in how the profession is structured, led or rewarded. Understanding why requires looking beyond the numbers – into the architecture of the profession itself.
The RCVS’ own surveys provide the clearest empirical picture of the profession’s current structure. The 2019 survey found that 44% of male respondents occupied principal, director or partner roles, compared to 18.1% of female respondents.
Meanwhile, 66.2% of female respondents were employed as assistants, compared to 38.8% of men. In a profession where women are the majority, they remain, by a considerable margin, the minority in positions of leadership and ownership.
Research published in Veterinary Record (2018) found a gender pay gap of up to 36% at partner level. Across all practice types and seniority levels, male practitioners consistently command higher remuneration than their female counterparts. This gap is not fully explained by hours worked, specialism or experience alone. Something structural is operating within it.
Women are disproportionately concentrated in companion animal practice. Men remain more prevalent in large-animal, equine and specialist referral work – the areas that attract higher remuneration and professional status (Irvine and Vermilya, 2010). Approximately one-third of female veterinary surgeons work part-time, a proportion that has grown as women have come to dominate the clinical workforce (RCVS, 2016). And women are, on the available evidence, significantly less likely than men to hold equity, practice ownership or directorial authority in the corporate groups that now represent a substantial share of UK practice (RCVS, 2019).
These are not isolated data points. Together, they describe a pattern. Sociologists use two terms for it: vertical segregation – the underrepresentation of women in senior and leadership roles – and horizontal segregation, or the concentration of women in the lower-status, lower-remuneration areas of a profession (Anker, 1998). Both are present, and both are persistent, in UK veterinary medicine.
The pipeline argument – that change is simply a matter of time, that the numbers are moving in the right direction, that patience is the virtue required – becomes harder to sustain when the pipeline has been full for 30 years.
Eagly and Carli (2007) proposed replacing the metaphor of the glass ceiling with something they called the labyrinth: not a single barrier at the top of a career, but a complex and shifting series of structural and cultural obstacles that, individually, appear navigable, and collectively, constitute a system. Biased performance evaluations. Limited access to sponsorship networks. Part-time penalties that stall careers at the moments of greatest clinical productivity. Promotion criteria that privilege the kind of uninterrupted, full-time trajectory that care-giving responsibilities, still disproportionately carried by women, make structurally difficult.
None of these obstacles appear in any job description. None are explicit policies. That is, in part, what makes them so durable.
My doctoral research draws on three theoretical frameworks to make sense of what the data describes. I share them here not as abstract academic constructs but as tools for seeing something that is otherwise easy to miss.
The first is Acker’s (1990) concept of the “ideal worker”. Acker argued that organisations are not gender-neutral. They carry within their hierarchies and expectations the logic of the era in which they were built – and in the case of most professional organisations, that logic was built around a male career model: a worker without primary care-giving responsibilities, available at all times, willing to subordinate everything else to professional advancement. This standard was not designed to exclude women. It was designed in the absence of them. But the effect, in practice, amounts to the same thing.
The second is what Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) describe as hegemonic masculinity: the dominant cultural standard against which professional behaviour is measured, not through individual enforcement, but through absorption into organisational structure. In veterinary medicine, this manifests in the cultural prestige still attached to large-animal and surgical work; in the association of clinical authority with emotional detachment; in the expectation of long and inflexible hours as a signal of serious professional commitment. These norms do not require anyone to intend them. They require only that no one decides to change them.
It is worth pausing on something that is sometimes lost in discussions of this kind. Hegemonic masculinity does not only constrain women. Men who choose companion animal practice, who want to work flexibly, who are carried by structural assumption into seniority they have not sought – what Simpson (2004) called the glass escalator effect – are also operating within a set of expectations that were not designed with its full humanity in mind. This is a structural conversation, not a gendered accusation.
The third framework is critical mass theory, developed by Kanter (1977) and elaborated by Dahlerup (1988). The core proposition is intuitive: as the proportion of a minority group within an organisation increases, their collective capacity to influence institutional culture grows. At a sufficient threshold, cultural transformation follows.
The veterinary profession is now the most significant test case for this proposition in contemporary British professional life. Women have made up most of the clinical workforce for more than 10 years. And yet, as Treanor, Marlow and Swail (2021) document in their study of UK women veterinary professionals, gendered patterns of leadership, pay and specialisation have proven remarkably resistant to change. Numbers, it appears, are necessary but not sufficient. You can have a feminised workforce and structures that were built for a different workforce entirely.
Critical mass theory predicted that once women reached a sufficient threshold, the institution would begin to transform. The veterinary profession is now the evidence by which that prediction must be evaluated.
References will be available on publication of part 2.