Dr. Marchetti on gender disparities in surgical experience of urology residents

In this interview, Kathyrn Marchetti, MD, shares the background and notable findings from the Urology paper “Gender-Based Disparity Exists in the Surgical Experience of Female and Male Urology Residents.” Marchetti is a Society of Urologic Oncology fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Transcription:

Please describe the background for this study.

Gender disparities in medicine are well documented across many fields, including urology. We know that male surgeons get more referrals than female surgeons and actually in some specialties do have higher annual salary. Luckily, that is changing, as we see with the 2024 match statistics that almost 50% of the applicants were women, which is really exciting. But in examining that disparity, I was looking at the AUA Census data and saw that more female providers actually do fellowships than male providers, which led me to ask why exactly would that be? And then that kind of developed into the question that we asked in the study, which is, is there a disparity in the residency training between male and female urology residents?

What were some of the notable findings?

There are 3 findings that I want to highlight from the study. The first one is that male residents do about 100 more cases over the 4 years of urology-specific training than female residents, which is a significant difference. That case log difference was primarily within the general urology and oncology case types. And then we also saw that female urology residents logged more cases in the assistant role than male residents. In summary, that tells us that male residents are logging a significantly higher number of cases during their surgical training, and that of the cases that women are in, considering the fact that they perceive themselves as being in the assistant role more frequently, that may mean that the surgical experiences they do have are different than the surgical experiences that their male counterparts have.

This transcription was edited for clarity.