Assessing Group-level Gender Bias in Professional Evaluations: The Case of Medical Student End-of-Shift Feedback

Abstract

Although approximately 50% of medical school graduates today are women, female physicians tend to be underrepresented in senior positions, make less money than their male counterparts and receive fewer promotions. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating gender bias in various forms of evaluation in medicine, but this work was mainly conducted by looking for specific words using fixed dictionaries such as LIWC and focused on recommendation letters. We use a dataset of written and quantitative assessments of medical student performance on individual shifts of work, collected across multiple institutions, to investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in a day-to-day context for medical students. We investigate differences in the narrative comments given to male and female students by both male or female faculty assessors, using a fine-tuned BERT model. This allows us to examine whether groups are written about in systematically different ways, without relying on hand-crafted wordlists or topic models. We compare these results to results from the traditional LIWC method and find that, although we find no evidence of group-level gender bias in this dataset, terms related to family and children are used more in feedback given to women.

Professionalism and professional identity formation in dental students: Revisiting the professional role orientation inventory (PROI)

“…Studies have shown how bias presents to varying degrees in subjective professionalism evaluation of medical students and residents. [45][46][47][48][49] A strong use of the PROI may be its inclusion in dental student portfolios to assess proficiency and competency in professionalism and ethical decision making; or even consideration in portfolios used for licensure board credentialing. Other uses of the PROI could include pre/postassessment throughout student or resident clinical training, allowing for comparison data and appropriate and meaningful advising when ethical dilemmas arise.…”