Gender Bias Affects Assessment of Frailty and Recommendations for Surgery

Physician gender bias in surgical treatment recommendations is recognized but not well understood. This study hypothesized that gender differences may exist in interpretation of patients' physical behaviors and that these differences may be associated with decision making by providers and surrogate decision makers.

A pool of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers was solicited to participate in an online assessment. Workers viewed 3 short videos of standardized patients (SPs) trained to exhibit physical characteristics of vigorous, frail, and neither vigorous nor frail (average) behavior and then answered survey questions related to video characteristics and whether they would support the SP's decision to undergo an indicated major lung resection.

There were 724 participating workers; their mean age was 42.6 ± 11.8 years, and 386 were women. Men judged the average SP to be younger (P = .025), and women were more likely to recognize weight loss in the frail SP (P = .009). Overall, men and women were equally supportive of lung resection when indicated. The likelihood of supporting a decision to proceed with resection was inversely related to SP distress (P < .001) and was directly related to increasing gait speed (P < .001), energy (P < .001), and strength (P < .001). Male participants were less likely to support resection related to higher energy (P = .02) and strength levels (P = .016).

Gender differences exist in how video portrayal of patient frailty is perceived and affects surgical recommendations. Understanding such differences may aid in educational efforts directed at reducing gender-based biases in treatment recommendations by physicians and surrogate decision makers.