It's been 100 years since women were allowed to become vets – but we are still fighting to smash the glass ceiling

Equality legislation has helped more and more women enter the veterinary profession, but there is still a gender gap in management roles and pay

The average age that today’s veterinary surgeons decided on their career is 12. For me it was five. But as a child of working class immigrant parents living in inner city London, it was hard to find people like me to look up to, hard to find opportunities to interact with a range of animals, and completely impossible to call on family or friends for essential work experience.

As a result, I had to take a long and difficult route to becoming a veterinary surgeon, but I was determined and had a very supportive family to back me up. My female predecessors who dreamt of a career as a vet, however, faced an even longer journey to entering the profession.

The old adage that “you can’t be, what you can’t see” sums up the importance of having role models that look or sound like us. But until 1919, if you wanted to be a vet in the UK, the only role models you could see were men. Because until 1919, if you wanted to be a vet you had to be a man.

This month we’re celebrating one hundred years since an act of parliament allowed women to enter my profession for the first time and practise as veterinary surgeons. The year 1919 also saw the first woman take her seat in the House of Commons and the entry of women into law and chartered accountancy.

The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act removed the legal barriers that prevented women entering these professions and the civil service, as well as becoming jurors. It allowed universities to award women degrees. And it paved the way for Aleen Cust to become the first female veterinary surgeon to be recognised by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) in 1922.

Having been accepted by the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh to study veterinary medicine, Aleen completed all of the course requirements in 1897 (and won the gold medal for zoology) but was barred by the RCVS from sitting her final examination. She unsuccessfully challenged this decision through the courts, and it took the change in national legislation 22 years later for her to be formally recognised as a qualified veterinary surgeon.

In the 1970s, equalities legislation lifted the cap on the number of female vet students, which had been set at 12 per cent of the total, and today women make up 80 to 90 per cent of our student population.

I’m the fifth female president of the British Veterinary Association – the national representative body for vets – in our 137-year history. Mandisa Greene, the incoming president of our regulator the RCVS, will be the first woman of colour in one of the profession’s top roles. And we now have women in the most senior veterinary positions as chief veterinary officers in the UK government, Scotland and Wales.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve smashed the glass ceiling … yet.

In line with much of the rest of society, women in our profession are still under represented in management positions and the gender pay gap is evident across all the different veterinary sectors – in small animal practice, livestock and equine work, research and academia, and public health.

And there are wider questions about diversity in our profession. People from ethnic minorities are significantly under represented and those who are privately educated are significantly over represented. As a public facing profession, we’re not doing the best job of reflecting the society we serve.

It’s not just about role models. We know from the excellent Aspires research at UCL that today’s school children face insurmountable systemic barriers to pursuing careers in Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths). At the most basic level, if your school curriculum doesn’t offer single award sciences at GCSE, you face an uphill struggle to get onto competitive science-based degree courses at university.

We can lobby for these structural problems to be fixed but layered on top are the attitudes and cultures that subtly and overtly tell girls, working class children, and Bame children that certain subjects aren’t for them. But why shouldn’t they be?

I’m heartened by the many fantastic initiatives to promote Stem and widen participation to encourage young people from non-traditional backgrounds into university and into the professions. This year I met with the amazing Animal Aspirations team at my alma mater, the Royal Veterinary College – a student-led project to increase diversity in veterinary medicine and animal-related careers.#

In the New Year, I’m going back to my secondary school in south London – an inner city voluntary-aided comprehensive – to talk to pupils about my journey to vet school and hopefully show them that people like us can be veterinary surgeons and scientists, or anything else that they want to be.

Like me, Aleen Cust had only ever wanted to be one thing. A century ago she was working as a vet but not legally recognised as one. Today we celebrate women in our profession, but we’ve still got a way to go on equality, diversity and inclusion. We’re up for the challenge.

Daniella Dos Santos is a veterinary surgeon in a small and exotics practice in Kent and president of the British Veterinary Association.