Female and Male Surgeons’ Interactions with Patients

There are a number of benefits of involving patients in medical decision making, from legal concerns to quicker recovery in surgery patients. But do surgeons themselves see these benefits? And if so, to what degree do their actual interactions with patients reflect this? Are there gender differences? A study by Garcia-Retamero and colleagues can give us some answers.

They collected data from a diverse sample of surgeons from 60 different countries and found that the majority of surgeons agreed that involving patients in medical decision making was desirable. The preference for a collaborative role was more pronounced among female compared to male surgeons. However, when asked about their usual (rather than ideal) role in medical decision making, women were much less likely to be collaborative compared with men – 81% of female surgeons reported that their role was usually “active” (rather than collaborative), compared to 45% of men.

The authors suggest that this discrepancy between preferred and usual roles might be due to the fact that women may feel the need to act in a more “masculine” way in order to be seen as an authority but another possibility might be that female surgeons are simply more critical of their own behaviour.