Background Orthopaedics is the least gender-diverse medical specialty. Research suggests that the use of gendered language can contribute to workforce disparity and that gender-neutral language supports the inclusion and advancement of women, but the degree to which gender-neutral language is used by academic departments in what typically is a department’s highest position (department chair) has not been characterized. Questions/purposes (1) Is the proportion of department websites that use the term chairman (as opposed to chair) greater in orthopaedics than in five other surgical and medical specialties? (2) Are departments led by chairs who are women less likely to use “chairman” than those led by men, and does this vary by specialty? Methods Seven hundred fourteen official websites of orthopaedic, neurosurgery, general surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology departments affiliated with 129 allopathic medical schools were screened. Any use of the term chairman on title pages, welcome messages, and faculty profile pages was identified using a Boyer-Moore string-search algorithm and terms were classified based on their location on the site. The overall use of the term chairman was compared by specialty and gender of the chair. Results Sixty percent of orthopaedic department websites (71 of 119) used the term chairman at least once, a proportion higher than that of pediatrics (36% [46 of 128]; OR 0.38; 95% CI, 0.23 to 0.63; p < 0.001), internal medicine (31% [38 of 122]; OR 0.030; 95% CI, 0.18 to 0.53; p < 0.001), and obstetrics and gynecology (29% [37 of 126]; OR 0.28; 95% CI, 0.17 to 0.48; p < 0.001), but no different than that of neurosurgery (57% [54 of 94]; OR 0.91; 95% CI, 0.52 to 1.6; p = 0.74) and general surgery (55% [69 of 125]; OR 0.83; 95% CI, 0.50 to 1.4; p = 0.48). Across disciplines, departments whose chairs were women were much less likely to use the term chairman than departments whose chairs were men (14% [17 of 122] versus 50% [297 of 592]; OR 0.16; 95% CI, 0.09 to 0.28; p < 0.001). Conclusions The frequent use of the term chairman in orthopaedics, coupled with the preference of women to use the term chair, suggests considerable room for growth in the use of gender-equal language in orthopaedics. Clinical Relevance Our current efforts to increase the number of women in orthopaedics may be undermined by gendered language, which can create and reinforce gendered culture in the field. Electing to use gender-neutral leadership titles, while a relatively small step in the pursuit of a more gender-equal environment, presents an immediate and no-cost way to support a more inclusive culture and counteract unconscious gender bias. Future studies should explore the individual attitudes of chairs regarding the use of gendered titles and identify additional ways in which biases may manifest; for example, the use of gendered language in interpersonal communications and the presence of unconscious bias in leadership evaluations. Continued efforts to understand implicit bias in orthopaedics can guide actionable strategies for counteracting gendered stereotypes of the specialty, in turn aiding initiatives to recruit and promote women in the field.

How did child gender affect deliberations and voting at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention? Though recent scholarship has found profound and far-reaching influence of child gender upon the beliefs and behavior of modern parents, there is no reason to believe that this is only an important consideration in the present. Leveraging the natural experiment of child gender, we test whether the gender of a delegate's children influenced his voting. We hypothesize that fathers of sons would favor creating a strong national government because they could more easily envision their sons holding places in the emergent empire (especially younger sons). Using new data on delegates' children, we find statistically and substantively significant results: having sons indeed predicts delegates' favoring a stronger, centralized national government (with daughters showing an opposite effect). These differences are sufficiently large to have likely affected the Convention's proceedings and therefore the U.S. Constitution.

How do legislators respond to electoral competition? We consider this question by looking at the relationship between legislative productivity and the competitiveness of legislators’ primary and general elections. Building on Volden and Wiseman’s preliminary investigation of the electoral connection to legislative productivity, we introduce to that analysis the critical and often-overlooked distinction between primary and general election competitiveness. Employing panel data of U.S. House members spanning three decades (1979-2009), we find significant evidence of a positive relationship between primary vote share and legislative effectiveness, much of which is explained by having primary opposition at all. These results have substantial implications for our understanding of both the electoral connection and legislative behavior.