Gender and Ethnicity Bias in Medicine: A Text Analysis of 1.8 Million Critical Care Records
Gender and ethnicity biases are pervasive across many societal domains including politics, employment, and medicine. Such biases will facilitate inequalities until they are revealed and mitigated at scale. To this end, over 1.8 million records from a large US hospital were evaluated with natural language processing techniques in search of gender and ethnicity bias indicators. Consistent with non-linguistic evidence of bias in medicine, physicians often focused on the emotions of female compared to male patients and focused more on the scientific diagnoses of male compared to female patients. Physicians reported on fewer emotions for Black patients versus White patients and physicians demonstrated the greatest need to work through diagnoses for Black women compared to other patients. This work provides evidence of gender and ethnicity biases in medicine as communicated by physicians in the field and requires the critical examination of institutions that perpetuate bias in social systems.