Like every Sunday, we find Dr Martin Ducret, doctor and journalist at the Doctor’s Daily, to evoke these sexist prejudices which still exist in medicine. Gender bias against female physicians. To date, in France, one out of two doctors is a woman.
franceinfo: A Japanese study makes it possible to debunk received ideas about female doctors?
Yes, a solid study, published this week, shows that female surgeons perform as well as their male counterparts. The study found no difference between the two sexes, out of the nearly 300,000 patients operated on for gastrectomy, a long and high-risk stomach operation.
This study allows a real awareness of the sexist prejudices to which women doctors are subject, despite having equivalent skills to men.
And by extrapolation, these sexist prejudices concern a large number of women in the medical field. Nurses and orderlies, to name but a few.
What forms do these prejudices take?
Mainly questioning of their medical skills, with reflections of the type: “Aren’t you too young to be a doctor, miss?” or, “When is the real doctor coming?”. There are also sexist allusions or sexual harassment, as there are still too many.
in our society.
How to fight against these sexist behaviors?
First of all, we must make the population aware that female doctors must be treated with respect and that they are as competent as male doctors, regardless of the medical specialty. It seems obvious to us, but it is apparently not the case for everyone!
Moreover, a previous study shows the extent of the work that remains to be
accomplish ?
Yes, an international study published in June 2022 evaluated certain negative behaviors against 1200 sports doctors, men and women, from more than 50 countries. It made it possible to highlight that the number of female doctors who were victims of contempt on the part of their interlocutors (athletes, coaches, sports federations, medical colleagues) was at least 10% higher than that of a man, and this somewhat or the sex of the interlocutor. That is to say that an athletic patient, for example, male or female, was more likely to question the doctor’s medical skills if the latter was a woman.
This study also shows that female sports doctors were 10 times more exposed to sexual harassment than male sports doctors, knowing that they were harassed mainly by males.
>>> Bibliographic references
– Tsukahara Y, Novak M, Takei S, et al
Gender bias in sports medicine: An international assessment of sports medicine physicians’ perceptions of their interactions with athletes, coaches, athletic trainers and other physicians.
British Journal of Sports Medicine 2022;56:961-969.
– Okoshi K, Endo H, Nomura S, Kono E, Fujita Y, Yasufuku I et al.
Comparison of short term surgical outcomes of male and female gastrointestinal surgeons in Japan: retrospective cohort study