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Female Med Students On Edge? Leave Them Alone

It turns out that female doctors-to-be don't just feel more nervous than their male counterparts but they actually appear more nervous to their patients, says an Indiana University School of Medicine Study.

Published in this month's issue of Patient Education and Counseling, researchers found that this decreased confidence among women is not connected to academic performance, but only clinical performance in undergraduate medical education. Their suggestion? Changes to the medical curriculum to boost fem-docs confidence.

What the study does not reveal is whether the gender gap that exists at the time of training persists beyond med school into residency or actual practice. Moreover, why highlight these differences?

Particularly if this gap represents only a phase during the earliest periods of becoming a physician, singling women out and making them feel as though their increased anxiety, their lesser confidence is a problem to be medicalized and cured like the diseases they study? This approach is completely backward.

These findings are interesting sure--and something for undergraduate medical educators to be aware of and to take account of--but this is not something to "treat" or to change medical education over. Let women be aware of and experience their feelings--they will go on to be doctors who are just as confident, calm, and patient-centered as their male counterparts. That is, unless they are made to feel at the earliest stages of their training, that they are in some way lesser.

Summer Johnson, PhD