Do health care professionals associate certain medical fields with men or women?

Since 1999, the number of female medical students in the United States has nearly equaled that of males, and two years ago, for the first time, there were more women than men. But faculty appointments haven’t mirrored that trend, especially in surgery. To measure implicit bias among health care professionals, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis asked people to sort words as fast as possible into categories. If you were quicker to pair “male” with “career” than you were “female,” that was understood as a hint of an unspoken association. No matter their gender, race, professional title, or region of origin, 131 surgeons showed strong implicit associations of men with surgery and women with family medicine. But when asked explicitly, men were more likely than women to express such an association.