PS6-10: THE IMPACT OF THE GENDER GAP ON SURGEON TEACHING SCORES
Tulin Cil, M Kulasegaram, PhD, R Freeman, MD, S Ginsburg, MD, L Stroud, MD; University of Toronto

Background: Gender bias may impact on many aspects of academic practice for women surgeons, including evaluations.  Other studies have shown that gender may be a factor in the teaching evaluations for medical faculty, yet the extent of such bias in surgery is not well documented. We aimed to determine whether gender bias exists in residents’ assessments of surgical faculty teaching at a large Canadian medical school.

Methods: Residents’ ratings of all surgical faculty from 2016-17 were analyzed. We averaged ratings on a multi-item 5-point scale to create a teaching score. Faculty and resident gender were coded. We analyzed our data using a mixed-effects linear model with random intercepts for teachers and fixed effects for teacher gender, gender pairing (i.e. gender discord), and adjusted for whether ratings were given by surgery residents or from off-service residents. We did not have access to faculty academic rank in order to adjust for supervisory experience and/or perceptions of hierarchy.

Results: Nearly 2250 ratings on 377 surgical faculty from 585 trainees were analyzed. Sixteen-percent of faculty were female while 38% of trainees were female and overall 48.5% of trainees were surgical residents. The mean rating assigned to faculty was 4.42 (Median 4.75) on a scale of 1-5. Male residents gave higher ratings than female residents (F(1,2218)=11.28, p<0.001). We detected a significant but small effect of gender discordance (F(1,2215)= 3.9, p<0.05). Further exploration showed that this effect was driven by male residents giving higher scores to male faculty (4.56) compared to female faculty (4.38). Female residents rated male and female faculty similarly.

Discussion: There are small but significant effects in favour of male faculty rated by male residents. Reasons for this require further exploration including the culture of surgery and more proximate factors such as the number of male faculty supervising, seniority, and teaching experience.