Patients May Not Be All That Biased

There is a lot of research on how women in male-dominated areas (e.g. management or politics) are in a somewhat “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. When they present themselves in a warm and feminine way their demeanor is at odds with what the field requires (e.g. they’re not perceived as “real leaders”), but if they present themselves in a masculine, assertive way, they’re not perceived as “real women” and thus disliked. So is that also the case in surgery? A recent study by Marie Dusch and colleagues suggests that this may not necessarily be the case, at least not from the patients’ perspective.

They presented patients in a general hospital with short scenarios describing either a male or a female surgeon who presented themselves in either a feminine or masculine way. Moreover, they were described as either performing breast cancer surgery or lung cancer surgery. Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me) patients did in general not prefer male surgeons over female surgeons or masculine surgeons over feminine ones. Neither did they prefer masculine male surgeons to feminine male surgeons or feminine female surgeons to masculine female surgeons – nor the opposite. In fact, the only significant result they found was that for lung cancer surgery, masculine surgeons were seen as more competent regardless of gender.

While it is important to replicate these results before drawing strong conclusions, this study nevertheless shows that gender stereotypes in surgery may be slowly changing or at least not be as pervasive among patients as we might assume.