A new study from scholars at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has uncovered a gender bias against women doctors in patient-written reviews, finding women physicians are more likely to be judged on their interpersonal skills than their male colleagues.
For their study, the authors analyzed over 345,000 online reviews of more than 167,000 physicians. The reviews prompted patients to rate their doctor on a scale of 1 to 5 and included the option to add written comments.
According to their analysis, the authors found women physicians were more likely than male physicians to receive any patient comment regarding their interpersonal manner, and had a higher likelihood for those comments be negative. Women primary-care physicians (PCPs) and surgeons were also more likely to receive negative reviews for their technical competence. However, among those who did receive positive comments on their technical abilities, women were less likely than men to receive a rating of at least 4 stars.
“Female PCPs face two compounding interpersonal stereotypes: both women and PCPs are expected to be warm,” the authors write. “Thus, seemingly cold female PCPs may have been particularly salient to patients, who then perceived these female PCPs more harshly than they would male PCPs. Alternatively, female PCPs may have provided objectively worse patient-centered care than their male counterparts. Yet, research has shown that female physicians are more patient centered than males, providing a reason to doubt this argument.”
Furthermore, as women physicians were more likely to receive criticism on their technical competence, the authors theorize “patients may have more easily noticed poor technical performance by female PCPs compared with male PCPs because poor performance confirmed their stereotype bias that women were not as technically competent as men.”
Going forward, the research team suggests healthcare administrators and policymakers should focus on increasing awareness of gender bias in patient reviews, adjust survey measures to elicit more gender-balanced perceptions, and provide objective measures of technical competence alongside patients’ written reviews.