Female Surgeons as Counter Stereotype: The Impact of Gender Perceptions on Trainee Evaluations of Physician Faculty

Publication date: Available online 7 May 2018
Source:Journal of Surgical Education
Author(s): Magali Fassiotto, Jie Li, Yvonne Maldonado, Nishita Kothary
ObjectiveSimilar to women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines, women in medicine are subject to negative stereotyping when they do not adhere to their sex-role expectations. These biases may vary by specialty, largely dependent on the gender's representation in that specialty. Thus, females in male-dominated surgical specialties are especially at risk of stereotype threat. Herein, we present the role of gender expectations using trainee evaluations of physician faculty at a single academic center, over a 5-year period (2010-2014).DesignUsing Graduate Medical Education evaluation data of physician faculty from MedHub, we examined the differences in evaluation scores for male and female physicians within specialties that have traditionally had low female representation (e.g., surgical fields) compared to those with average or high female representation (e.g., pediatrics).SettingStanford Medicine residents and fellows' MedHub ratings of their physician faculty from 2010 to 2014.ParticipantsA total of 3648 evaluations across 1066 physician faculty.ResultsOverall, female physicians received lower median scores than their male counterparts across all specialties. When using regression analyses controlling for race, age, rank, and specialty-specific characteristics, the negative effect persists only for female physicians in specialties with low female representation.ConclusionsThis finding suggests that female physicians in traditionally male-dominated specialties may face different criteria based on sex-role expectations when being evaluated by trainees. As trainee evaluations play an important role in career advancement decisions, dictate perceptions of quality within academic medical centers and affect overall job satisfaction, we propose that these differences in evaluations based merely on gender stereotypes could account, in part, for the narrowing pipeline of women promoted to higher ranks in academic medicine.



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