At least on this side of the water in Ireland and the UK (and I gather to some degree in Sweden), the problem is MONEY.
The days of James Harriot and the privacy practices are mostly gone even in the rural areas, the prominent places treat people like employees. In the old days (like when we moved here) most vets in the rural areas were still James Harriot's seeing sick cows and delivering stuck foals by day and working until 9 pm at their small animal clinics to treat farm dogs and occasional pet cats.
These days, many vets are in the same position as newer doctors, underpaid contracted staff with huge student loans to pay off (even in Ireland and the UK) with little or no attonomy in their jobs and with a future of staying years as low level staff or jr. partners.
The simple fact is that not only do most women prefer to be small animal vets (with exceptions, my friend in Sweden who dropped out because of some of this wanted to work with cows, she's a big girl) but they also are more likely to have partners or husbands also bringing home a good paycheck.
That, and while this is changing, even today I think a lot more women are willing to accept worse pay and uneven working conditions in order to have a career they really love, or think they will love. Like women who become human nurses, they are more likely to stay around even the conditions are bad because they feel they have a calling or a responsibility to patients. I am not saying the male nurses and male vets don't, it is just my personal opinion that men are a bit faster to drop a career that seems to be going nowhere or doesn't provide support and switch to something else.
These problems were starting back when I had a close friend in Colorado wha o was vet tech and decided not to go back to school to retrain as a vet 40 years ago. The handwriting was on the wall then, like doctors now, vets are becoming contract employees with little job security and with a lot of their older duties farmed out to others.
When my engineer housemate was out of work, she talked our local vet about retaining and he told her not to bother, there wasn't enough work, the pay was terrible and many younger vets ended up working part-time or not at all. He said it wasn't worth going into debt for and that he wouldn't do it under today's conditions.
A lot of women with families are happy to work part time (not all but some) which is probably another reason you see so many more ladies in the field, that and as a rule, they enjoy small animal practices which outside of agricultural areas is the main type of clinic these days.
That's the view from here (and elsewhere, I did have to talk to a lot of people writing the Barn Cat Book).