Sexism Among Doctors Quantified
New research opens old wounds
A new series of studies about the impact of gender in the medical field were published this week, and they tell quite a story. Taken as a whole, the data illustrates a field of work that has yet to catch up with gender equity advances in spite of the fact that the number of female doctors continues to rise. Let’s take a look at some of these studies.
Surgery referrals differ by surgeon’s gender
A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) of over 40 million referrals for surgery found that male physicians referred patients primarily to other male surgeons. While males make up 77 percent of surgeons, male physicians referred their patients to male surgeons 87 percent of the time. Female physicians referred to male surgeons 79 percent of the time. The only area where there was a difference was when male physicians were more likely to refer female patients to female surgeons. These data show that referral biases affect female surgeons’ livelihood.
The gender of your surgeon may affect your surgical outcome
Staying in the medical arena, another JAMA study looking at surgical outcomes of over 1.3 million operations found that 14 percent of patients had…
