76.9% of first year medical students female at McMaster

By Carolyn Abraham and Kate Hammar, Globe an Mail, October 21, 2010
For Harold Reiter the tipping point was the entering class of 2002.

As the new chair of admissions at McMaster University's medical school, he took one look at the proportion of women admitted – a whopping 76.9 per cent – and wondered what had happened to the men.
The gender gap at the university's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine was one of the widest in the country and one of the factors that prompted Dr. Reiter to rethink the admissions criteria.
“It was those very numbers that made me start to look at the breakdown of the applicant pool, in terms of the ratio of male to female, and the discovery of what was, I think, an over-emphasis on grade point average,” he said.

Basing admissions mostly on marks, it seemed, had contributed to the decline of men's numbers in medical schools. Dr. Reiter, who was new to the position, decided the school should put less emphasis on marks and broaden its requirements, which eventually it did. The proportion of men has since slightly increased.
There is, apparently, an unstated, even under-the-table initiative to attempt to balance enrolment by gender, among Canadian medical schools; however, the idea is so politically explosive that few will speak about it.
(From the above piece in the Globe and Mail)
However, according to Paul Cappon, more than one faculty has done something about the gender factor.

Dr. Cappon, president and CEO of the Canadian Council on Learning, says that for the past five to eight years, some universities across the country have been tinkering with admissions to boost the number of men in medical school – looking beyond marks to give male applicants, in particular, credit for things like community service.
He predicted no one would say it was going on.
Dr. Cappon, who was a vice-president at Laurentian University, a former director-general of the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada and a former professor of medicine at McGill University, says “schools are doing that surreptitiously in Canada, deans of law and medicine. I used to be an academic VP running a university and I know they are doing it.”
Schools are “doing it surreptitiously, because it's politically incorrect to do it,” he says.