Impact of Gender on Clinical Evaluation of Trainees in the Intensive Care Unit

Background: Gender disparities in medical education are increasingly demonstrated, including in trainee assessment. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate whether gender differences exist in trainees' evaluation during intensive care unit (ICU) rotations, which has not been previously studied. Methods: We reviewed the in-training evaluation reports (ITERs) for trainees rotating through five academic ICUs at the University of Toronto over a 10-year period (2007-2017). We compared the mean global score for the rotation and the mean score for seven training subdomains between men and women trainees. All scores were reported on a scale of 1 (unsatisfactory) to 5 (outstanding). Results: Over the 10-year period, there were 3,203 ITERS overall, representing 1,207 women and 1,996 men trainees. The mean overall score was lower for women than for men trainees: 4.26 (standard deviation [SD], 0.58) for women and 4.30 (SD, 0.60) for men ( P  = 0.04). This difference was driven by anesthesia trainees, in whom the mean overall score was 4.21 for women and 4.37 for men ( P  < 0.001), with men trainees scoring consistently higher across all seven training subdomains. Within surgical, internal medicine, and critical care residents, there were no differences between men and women in the overall score or the scores across any of the seven subdomains. Across all ITERS, women were less likely than men to receive an overall rating of 5 (outstanding) for the ICU rotation (33% women vs. 37% men; odds ratio, 0.83; 95% confidence interval, 0.71-0.96). Conclusion: Overall, quantitative evaluation scores between women and men trainees in the ICU are relatively similar. Within anesthesia trainees, scores for men were consistently higher across all domains of evaluation, a finding that requires further investigation.