Assessment of Implicit Gender Bias During Evaluation of Procedural Competency Among Emergency Medicine Residents

Gender disparities exist throughout medicine. Recent studies have highlighted an attainment gap between male and female residents in performance evaluations on Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) milestones. Because of difficulties in blinding evaluators to gender, it remains unclear whether these observed disparities are because of implicit bias or other causes.

To estimate the magnitude of implicit gender bias in assessments of procedural competency in emergency medicine residents and whether the gender of the evaluator is associated with identified implicit gender bias.

A cross-sectional study was performed from 2018 to 2020 in which emergency medicine residency faculty assessed procedural competency by evaluating videos of residents performing 3 procedures in a simulated environment. They were blinded to the intent of the study. Proceduralists were filmed performing each procedure from 2 different viewpoints simultaneously by 2 different cameras. One was a gender-blinded (ie, hands-only) view, and the other a wide-angled gender-evident (ie, whole-body) view. The faculty evaluators viewed videos in a random order and assessed procedural competency on a global rating scale with extensive validity evidence for the evaluation of video-recorded procedural performance.

The primary outcome was to determine if there was a difference in the evaluation of procedural competency based on gender. The secondary outcome was to determine if there was a difference in the evaluations based on the gender of the evaluator.

Fifty-one faculty evaluators enrolled from 19 states, with 22 male participants (43.1%), 29 female participants (56.9%), and a mean (SD) age of 37 (6.4) years. Each evaluator assessed all 60 procedures: 30 gender-blinded (hands-only view) videos and 30 identical gender-evident (wide angle) videos. There were no statistically significant differences in the study evaluators' scores of the proceduralists based on their gender, and the gender of the evaluator was not associated with the difference in mean scores.

In this study, we did not identify a difference in the evaluation of procedural competency based upon the gender of the resident proceduralist or the gender of the faculty evaluator.