Gender-Based Linguistic Analysis of Pediatric Clinical Faculty Evaluations

Background: Gendered stereotypes are embedded in the culture of medicine. Women are stereotypically expected to act collaboratively and less assertively, while men are expected to act with authority and power. Whether gender-biased language is expressed in academic pediatric teaching evaluations is unknown. Objective: Determine whether stereotypic gender-based linguistic differences exist in resident evaluations of pediatric faculty. Methods: We performed a retrospective cross-sectional study of clinical faculty evaluations by pediatric residents in a single program from July 2016 to June 2019. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, responses to 2 open-ended questions were analyzed for stereotypic language. Categories were reported as a percent of total words written. Comparisons between gender groups were conducted using nonparametric Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Rates of word use within each category were analyzed using logistic regression where faculty and resident gender were included as predictor variables. Results: A total of 6436 free-text responses from 3218 unique evaluations were included. As hypothesized, evaluations of women faculty were less likely than those of men to include certain agentic language like power (odds ratio [OR] 0.9, P < .001) and insight (OR 0.9, P < .001), and research words (OR 0.6, P = .003). As expected, evaluations of women were more likely to include grindstone words, like “hardworking” (OR 1.2, P = .012). Contrary to our hypothesis, women received fewer teaching words like “mentor” (OR 0.9, P = .048) and communal words like “friendly” (OR 0.6, P = .001). Conclusion: Certain stereotypic language was demonstrated in clinical teaching evaluations of pediatric faculty. These findings should be further examined to improve gender inequities in academic pediatrics.