Female surgeons in Japan receive fewer opportunities than their male counterparts to perform complex operations, a study suggests.
Male surgeons continue to dominate in high-difficulty surgeries, despite successes by the Japanese Society of Gastroenterological Surgery to address the situation in 2021.
Chie Tanaka, an associate professor of gastrointestinal surgery at Nagoya University, and other researchers analysed a database covering over 95% of all surgeries in Japan to compare the number of operations performed by male and female surgeons in 2015, 2019, and 2023.
The nationwide retrospective study compared the number of operations performed by male and female surgeons.
The number of operations performed by each surgeon was calculated every two years of a surgeon’s experience, and a comparison was made between male and female surgeons. The years selected for analysis were 2015, 2019 and 2023.
Although the gender disparity had all but disappeared for low-difficulty surgeries by 2023, it still existed for medium-risk procedures, even though female surgeons were performing more operations.
Male surgeons continued to handle a significantly larger volume of high-risk operations.
The authors observed that initiatives aimed at improving working environments for female surgeons were effective, reducing the gender gap. However, gender disparities for high-difficulty surgeries persisted.
They wrote: ‘Almost no gender differences were observed in the number of low-difficulty surgeries. For medium-difficulty surgeries, the number performed by female surgeons showed an improving trend over the study period, yet some disparities remained. The number of high-difficulty surgeries (low anterior resection and pancreaticoduodenectomy) performed by male surgeons was higher than the number performed by female surgeons, except for protrusions. This disparity remained unchanged over the study period.’
They concluded: ‘The efforts of the Japanese Society of Gastrointestinal Surgery have been shown to be effective in mitigating gender disparities in the number of surgeries performed. High-difficulty surgeries have emerged as the primary target for further improvement initiatives.’
Emiko Kono, an assistant professor of gastroenterological surgery with Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University and co-author of the paper, said: ‘It is crucial to develop an environment that allows both male and female surgeons to show their full abilities.’
