In an operating room, Olakunle Idowu -- scrubbed and ready to assist a surgeon about to remove a heart for a transplant -- decided that a medical career was for him.
"That pretty much changed everything I felt. The whole experience of it all," said Idowu, 23, now a second-year medical student at Virginia Commonwealth University. "At that point, I could not see myself doing anything else."
After declines in minority applicants to medical schools in the wake of opposition to affirmative-action initiatives about a decade ago, the numbers have started to rebound.
But improvement is not across the board. Among medical school applicants and students, black women outnumber black men by a ratio of about 2-to-1, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The number of women, in general, enrolling in medical schools is growing the fastest, but for most other ethnic and racial groups, the male-female ratio of applicants and students is about 50-50. Women make up nearly 70 percent of blacks who apply to and are accepted into medical school. Why aren't black men choosing medicine?
Dr. Wally R. Smith, a VCU expert on health disparities, and others who grapple with the issue say it's a pipeline problem that starts early.
"I think the pipeline gets broken somewhere before the fourth grade," Smith said. "I think that what happens is men, especially men coming from single-parent homes, make the decision they cannot have a career which requires years of sacrifice in school and which ultimately gives them a good income but in order to get to that income, they have to . . . invest a lot of money in their education."
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