> What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented? … Is being a doctor one or the other? Depends on the specialty. Scott Alexander once observed:

> What makes an occupation people-oriented vs things-oriented? … Is being a doctor one or the other? Depends on the specialty. Scott Alexander once observed: > A look at percent female physicians by subspecialty is instructive. The specialty with the most women is pediatrics, followed by child psychiatry, followed by obstetrics, followed by – you get the picture. The specialties with the least women are the various surgeries – the ones where your patient is immobilized, anaesthetized, opened up, and turned into a not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires to poke and prod at – the ones that bear more than a passing resemblance to engineering. Source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/ —please note that the bulk of the piece is not strongly focused on this particular issue and is not a very representative context for this point. Scott restated the same point in a better context later on in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge..., but left out the “not-quite-color-coded collection of tubes and wires” bit which makes the point significantly less punchy and quotable. … For the record, there’s a similar pattern in veterinary medicine. The majority of vets who treat pets are women, but livestock veterinarians are predominantly men. IOW, whether or not animals are treated more like people or things correlates to a significant disparity in the predominant sex of the veterinarian treating them.