Studies suggesting patients do better in hospitals with more female surgeons need to be scrutinized carefully. But what if they're right?

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By Peter Shawn Taylor

As if major surgery isn’t stressful enough, here’s another thing to worry about: what if your surgeon is a man?

An emerging medical literature based on Canadian data suggests female surgeons are statistically better at their jobs than their male counterparts. One recent Ontario study finds that as the share of female surgeons and anesthetists at a hospital rises, the overall risk of post-operative complications falls. This result is much stronger when female surgeons perform the actual operations. Other studies using Ontario data bolster such findings. One shows that women-led surgeries cost the provincial health-care system substantially less than surgeries performed by men; another that patients are statistically more likely to die a year after surgery if their surgeon is a man.

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For decades the medical profession, along with all other occupations, has been under tremendous pressure to raise female participation on equity grounds. But claims that anything a man can do, a woman can do equally well have become old news. This latest evidence shows women are demonstrably better at surgery than men.

To be clear, these studies are all peer-reviewed, published in reputable journals, use sophisticated statistical measures and rely on large, high-quality data sets — not the normal characteristics of junk science. Yet there’s good reason to treat their results with healthy skepticism. And, even if true, they raise some very awkward questions.

The most recent study was published in March in the British Journal of Surgery (BJS). Based on over 700,000 surgeries in Ontario between 2009 and 2019, it finds a three per cent decline in “major morbidity” — significant post-operative complications including death — within 90 days of surgery when the share of female surgeons and anesthetists at a hospital rises above 35 per cent.

This benefit apparently arises from the intermingling of “different skills, knowledge, experiences, beliefs, values and leadership styles” caused by greater female representation. And there is supposedly a sweet spot where this advantage is maximized. Lead author and surgeon Julie Hallet of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre told the CBC, “A team of only male physicians will probably perform the same way a team of only female physicians, and both will be outperformed by balanced teams.”

The CBC, it bears mention, has greeted findings of a “diversity bonus” in the operating room with rapturous attention, given the implications for an incompetent patriarchy. On The Current, Saroo Sharda, an anesthesiologist and associate dean of equity and........

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