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 In one study, Dr. Julie Boiko of the University of California, San
Francisco and colleagues found that women are underrepresented among
speakers at grand rounds, which are presentations delivered by
esteemed doctors to medical teams at other institutions.
This was true for all but two of the medical specialties they
examined during 2014.
"Speaker selections convey messages of 'this is what a leader looks
like,' and women’s visibility in prestigious academic venues may
subconsciously affect women’s desires to pursue academic medicine,"
Boiko's team warns in JAMA Internal Medicine.
A separate study in the same issue of the journal found that female
doctors are judged to have less experienced when they finish
training. Arjun Dayal of the University of Chicago Pritzker School
of Medicine and colleagues analyzed 33,456 evaluations from 2013 to
2015 of 359 doctors-in-training, or residents, from 285 supervising
doctors at eight U.S. emergency medicine programs.
Male and female doctors scored similarly during their first years of
residency. But by the end of training, which typically lasted three
years, male doctors were judged to have about a 13 percent higher
attainment of important milestones than their female counterparts.
"We saw this across all the levels of competencies," said Dayal.
Female physicians were receiving poorer evaluations whether they
were diagnosing a patient or fulfilling physically demanding tasks.
The new study can't explain why women were evaluated lower than
their male counterparts, but the senior author suggests it may be
that women are judged more harshly as they take on leadership traits
that are stereotypically male.
"This study simply adds to a variety of other studies published
recently suggesting that female physicians face a negative
consequence in their work – for a lack of a better explanation –
because they’re female," said Dr. Vineet Arora, who is also at the
University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
A third study in the same journal found that medical students who
belong to racial or ethnic minority groups have lower odds of being
accepted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha honor society.
Dr. Dowin Boatright from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven,
Connecticut and colleagues looked at data on 4,655 medical students
who applied in 2013 to residency programs at their institution.
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Students would typically indicate on their applications if they were
members of Alpha Omega Alpha. "In terms of recognition, it is
probably one of the most prestigious honors you can receive as a
medical student," Boatright told Reuters Health.
Compared to white medical students, black students had 84 percent
lower odds of being Alpha Omega Alpha members, the researchers
found. Asian students had 48 percent lower odds, compared to white
students.
"I think all these studies are showing that implicit bias exists in
medical education, but people aren’t looking at measures to track
it," Boatright said.
Implicit bias consists of attitudes or stereotypes that affect
people's "understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious
manner," according to The Ohio State University's Kirwan Institute
for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Columbus.
In an editorial accompanying the new research, Dr. Molly Cooke of
the University of California, San Francisco, recounts the story,
from 2016, of a female African-American physician whose assistance
was rejected when one of her fellow airplane passengers became ill.
The flight crew didn't believe her when she said she was a doctor.
"What happened to Tamika Cross on Delta flight DL945 in October was
terrible," wrote Cooke. "However, it is not exclusively the fault of
the nonmedical world."
"We must insist that our profession and the processes that our
trainees encounter along the way treat them fairly and reflect the
diversity of the patients we serve," she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2n7xKvp, http://bit.ly/2n7sx6z, http://bit.ly/2n7v8gR
and http://bit.ly/2n7ol7c JAMA Internal Medicine, online March 6,
2017.
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