The Problem of Gender Bias in Medical Diagnosis
The old stereotype that men are doctors and women nurses seems to belong to another time, but when we look at the statistics, the categories still ring true. Despite 77% of the NHS workforce being women, only 5% of them work as doctors or dentists, compared to 22% of the male workforce holding one of these roles.
Of these, only 34% of specialist medical positions are held by women, although the number of female specialists in training is steadily growing. What this means in practice, is that although women make up over half of the population, when in need of specialist care, it’s likely we will be seen by a male doctor.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like much of a problem, but only because we like to think of doctors as benign, infallible, and unbiased professionals, operating within the strict guidelines of objective medical science. Unfortunately, there are two things wrong with this view.
Firstly, doctors are human just like the rest of us. They don’t practice medicine in a vacuum, and are just as prone to unconscious and conscious bias as we are. Secondly, medical science has a long history of both misunderstanding and mistreating female patients, and delays in diagnosis for women are startlingly common.
