Doing the Same and Earning Less: Male and Female Physicians in a New Medical Specialty

BACKGROUND Prior research has highlighted gender differences in online physician reviews, however, to date no research has linked online ratings with quality of care. OBJECTIVE To compare a consumer-generated measure of physician quality (online ratings) with a clinical quality outcome (sanctions for malpractice or improper behavior), to understand how patients’ perception and evaluation of doctors differ based on the physician’s gender and quality. METHODS We use data from a large online doctor reviews website and the Federation of State Medical Boards. We implement paragraph vector methods to identify words that are specific to and indicative of the separate groups of physicians. We then enrich these findings by utilizing the NRC word-emotion association lexicon to assign emotional scores to the various segments: gender, gender and sanction, and gender and rating. RESULTS We find significant differences in the sentiment and emotion of reviews for male and female physicians. We find that numerical ratings are lower and the sentiment in text reviews is more negative for women who will be sanctioned than for men who will be sanctioned; sanctioned male doctors are still associated with positive reviews. CONCLUSIONS Conclusions: Given the growing impact of online reviews on demand for physician services, understanding the different reviews faced by male and female physicians is important for consumers and for platform architects in order to revisit their platform design.

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EXPLORING NEW MEANINGS FOR AN OLD SYMBOL: PATIENTSʼ ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS OF MALE AND FEMALE PHYSICIANS DRESSED WITH AND WITHOUT TRADITIONAL WHITE COATS.

Journal of Investigative Medicine ◽

10.1097/00042871-200401001-00680 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 52 ◽

pp. S279

Author(s):

B Perry ◽

M Panda ◽

I S Okosun

Keyword(s):

Female Physicians ◽

Male And Female ◽

New Meanings ◽

Attitudes And Perceptions

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Ambiguous Bodies

10.5406/illinois/9780252036996.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Marli F. Weiner ◽

Mazie Hough

Keyword(s):

Mixed Race ◽

Maternal Influence ◽

The South ◽

Female Physicians ◽

Women's Bodies ◽

Male And Female ◽

The North ◽

Health And Illness ◽

Interracial Sex ◽

Anomalous Bodies

This chapter examines physicians' efforts to understand various types of anomalous bodies. Southern physicians who recognized race, sex, and place as essential aspects of bodies had to acknowledge that these categories were not always precisely defined. People could move from the North or from Europe to the South or from one place to another within it. Although custom and law defined all slaves as black, medicine was aware that interracial sex led to many bodies that combined the blood and thus the characteristics of the two races. Far less common, but certainly compelling to doctors, were bodies that exhibited aspects of both male and female. Physicians determined to define what was normal believed that studying bodies that fell between categories could help them understand health and illness. This chapter explores how southern physicians addressed the intellectual dilemmas posed by bodies of mixed race and by the ambiguous nature of women's bodies. It also considers how physicians thought about the maternal influence on the health of the fetus during the course of pregnancy.

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