Gender and ethnicity bias in medicine: a text analysis of 1.8 million critical care records
Loading...
Date
2022-08-18
Authors
Markowitz, David M.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Oxford Academic
Abstract
Gender and ethnicity biases are pervasive across many societal domains including politics, employment, and medicine. Such biases
will facilitate inequalities until they are revealed and mitigated at scale. To this end, over 1.8 million caregiver notes (502 millionwords)
from a large US hospitalwere evaluated with natural language processing techniques in search of gender and ethnicity bias indicators.
Consistent with nonlinguistic evidence of bias in medicine, physicians focusedmore on the emotions ofwomen compared tomen and
focused more on the scientific and bodily diagnoses of men compared to women. Content patterns were relatively consistent across
genders. Physicians also attended to fewer emotions for Black/African and Asian patients compared toWhite patients, and physicians
demonstrated the greatest need to work through diagnoses for Black/African women compared to other patients. Content disparities
were clearer across ethnicities, as physicians focused less on the pain of Black/African and Asian patients compared toWhite patients
in their critical care notes. This research provides evidence of gender and ethnicity biases in medicine as communicated by physicians
in the field and requires the critical examination of institutions that perpetuate bias in social systems.
Description
11 pages
Keywords
Bias, Gender, Ethnicity, Language, Medicine
Citation
David M Markowitz, Gender and ethnicity bias in medicine: a text analysis of 1.8 million critical care records, PNAS Nexus, Volume 1, Issue 4, September 2022, pgac157, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac157