Women in Surgical Residency Programs in Brazil: A Trend Analysis

There is a gender gap in the surgical field worldwide. Brazil and low- and middle-income countries generally tend to have a more profound gap. Therefore, we aim to assess the gender distribution in Brazilian surgical residencies.

From a national residencies' database, we collected residency entering years, names, and surgical subspecialties. We classified gender from the names using Gender API software and performed linear regression, binomial, and chi-square tests.

From 81,979 doctors (1931-2020), 36.6% were women (P < 0.001). Of 13 subspecialties, regarding the absolute numbers of women, only neurosurgery and plastic surgery did not significantly differ between gender per year. There was a statistically significant growth in the proportional rates of female representation among most of the surgical residencies analyzed. Overall, the least women's representation was in urology (3.8%). From all subspecialties analyzed, both genders had a significant linear absolute increase over the years (P < 0.05), except for obstetrics-gynecology and pediatric surgery for men. Until 1990, all surgical programs had at least one woman resident, except for colorectal surgery.

Although there is an overall lack of women surgeons in Brazil, we observed an increase in women in surgical residencies. Therefore, the study may demonstrate a future change in the Brazilian gender equity scenario and reflect the growing representation of women in medicine in Brazil, except for some surgical specialties.