Experts say patients shouldn’t pick a doctor simply because they are female — expertise, approachability, and communication skills are the traits to look for in any physician.
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Key Takeaways
A study of almost 800,000 hospitalized Medicare recipients found that patients were less likely to die or be readmitted to the hospital if they were treated by a female doctor.
While the study didn’t set out to prove why this might be, experts think that female doctors may be better at communication, leading to better outcomes.
While being a good listener and caregiver are traditionally female-coded traits, it’s possible for all doctors to learn and improve these skills.
Hospital patients may have better survival odds and a lower likelihood of serious complications that require repeat admissions when they’re treated by female physicians, a new study suggests.
For the study, researchers examined data on about 777,000 people covered by Medicare, the U.S. health program for people 65 and older, who were hospitalized between 2016 and 2019. They were all treated by hospitalists who specialized in providing care and coordinating treatments for people who are recovering from serious illnesses and injuries.
Both male and female patients had better survival odds and lower rates of repeat admissions within 30 days of leaving the hospital when they received care from female physicians, according to study results published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.[1]
While the study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how female physicians might provide better care than their male counterparts, it’s possible that this was due to differences in how female doctors practice medicine, says the senior study author Yusuke Tsugawa, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Female Doctors May Be Better at Communication
“We think that better adherence to clinical guidelines and better communication by female physicians may have led to lower readmission rates for patients treated by female physicians,” Dr. Tsugawa says.
Female patients had an 8.15 percent mortality rate with female doctors, compared with 8.38 percent with male doctors, a difference the researchers reported as clinically meaningful. Male patients also had better survival odds with female physicians — a 10.15 percent mortality rate versus 10.23 percent with male doctors — but this difference was too small to rule out the possibility that it was due to chance.
The trend with readmissions, or repeat hospitalizations within 30 days of discharge, was similar, the study found. Female patients had a 15.51 percent readmission rate with female physicians, compared with 16.01 percent with male doctors, a difference that was clinically significant. Male patients had readmission rates of 15.65 percent with female physicians and 15.87 percent with male doctors, a difference that was too small to rule out the possibility that it was due to chance.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that female doctors guarantee better patient outcomes, Tsugawa says.
“We don't think patients should choose female physicians over male physicians, because there is wider variation among physicians of the same gender than between female and male physicians,” Tsugawa says. “It is important to take into account multiple factors about physicians, such as their clinical experience and training, your prior experience with them, and how they communicate with you, rather than physicians’ gender.”
Caregiving Is a Gendered Role — but Everyone Can Learn to Do It Better
These differences in how doctors interact with patients aren’t something innate that female and male doctors are born with, or without — they’re learned behaviors that might be possible to change if medical schools focus more on teaching skills like listening and empathy, says Patricia Davidson, PhD, RN, the dean emerita of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and vice chancellor and president of the University of Wollongong in Australia.
“Gender is socially constructed, and in women provides greater permission to undertake the ‘caregiving’ role, which is more likely ascribed to the feminized role of other health professionals such as nurses, social workers, and dietitians,” says Dr. Davidson, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“Female physicians were likely more attentive to nonmedical factors such as accessing social support and social services, and greater listening to identify predictors of adverse outcomes, such as social isolation, inability to access services, and issues driving adherence with medical therapies.”
What the findings really underscore is that patients’ outcomes depend at least in part on physicians’ people skills, says Krisda Chaiyachati, MD, MPH, an adjunct assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“The scientific evidence that attentive listening and spending time with patients can be lifesaving is growing,” Dr. Chaiyachati says. “If, on average, female physicians are indeed better at both, then maybe how they connect with patients is a critical innate characteristic that affects whether patients live or die.”
