Faculty Research Fellows Lunch with Nishita Kothary

Nishita Kothary: "Seeing through a patient’s lens: the impact of gender-bias in physician evaluations."

Professor Kothary’s research looks at the impact of gender and associated descriptive terms used by patients in physician analysis. Partnering with linguistics and computer science, her team analyzed 40, 000 patient comments and correlated it with patient assigned quantitative scores (ratings).  Statistical analyses showed that patients use language associated with compassion and nurturing more frequently to describe female physicians across all medical specialties. Notably, frequent compassion-related language was positively correlated with higher quantitative ratings, and in fact, female physicians tend to receive higher ratings in their patient evaluations. Dr. Kothary will discuss this study and contrast it with the results of her previous work that analyzed the impact of gender on trainee evaluations of physician faculty.

Nishita Kothary is Professor of Radiology.