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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

13 pointsedent7 comments

As per my understanding, they only took half of the problem where they took the numbers and compared against the gender of the surgeons

But if you think about it, if those likely to die or have complications after a surgery are complicated case of patients, it's not as if those people would magically be splitted evenly amongst male and female surgeons

As female surgeon are less frequent, complicated cases will likely be taken care of by a male surgeon, therefore this result.

Assuming no bias in the choice of the surgeon, each female surgeon will work on the same fraction of complicated cases as their male colleagues, and thus their success ratios are unaffected by the representation of female surgeons.

On the other hand, bias in the choice of the surgeon for complicated cases would indeed have the effect you describe.

If this article causes people to conclude that female surgeons are better than males, and thus causes people in the future to choose female surgeons, then the complicated cases will be over-represented and thus their success ratio will plummet

> accounting for patient, procedure, surgeon, anesthesiologist, and hospital characteristics

This suggests to me that they have accounted for that to at least some degree. (I can't read the paper itself so I don't know the details.) At the very least I don't think one can simply dismiss the findings out of hand citing "if you think about it."

On the other hand, as the study clearly describes, there are numerous factors in complication and outcome post-op; for example, the patient understanding their discharge instructions. If female surgeons are, on average, better at communicating those instructions, it will necessarily lead to less readmission and complication.

Instead of immediately looking for reasons why men are actually better in spite of the study and in spite of knowing little about the subject matter, it might behoove you to not simply assume that your trivial case wasn’t accounted for by people who understand their subject quite well, and read the rest with an open mind.

A core reason why racism and sexism and stereotypes are wrong is that they steal away someone’s individuality. Even if it’s true that that on average female surgeons are better than male surgeons, people are individuals and it’s morally wrong to strip away their individuality and just judge them based on their gender. Surely their are bad and good female and male surgeons and dividing people into boxes this way is a terrible way to live life.

Or maybe one group could learn from the other instead of thinking they know best.

Flip the gender in the headline and there will be more comments. lol.

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