Investigating gender’s effects in medical residency selection in the United State
This project investigates the effects of gender in medical residency selection in the United States. Residency, which provides three to seven years of specialized training, is a key component of U.S. medical education.
We will conduct an experiment in which we introduce synthetic applications into the selection process at a major residency training site in anesthesia, a particularly male-dominated specialty.
The applications will consist of previous years’ applicants’ materials, but we will alter the applicants’ names and vary their gender. We will then observe any differences in the applicants’ rankings with their gender varied. We plan to run this experiment over several application cycles in order to keep the total number of synthetic applications low enough to avoid detection, and to allow variation in the composition of selection committees each year. We view this work as a case study that can be used as the basis for additional research in other areas of academic medicine, as well as in scientific fields in which employment and promotion decisions are often made using a similar in-depth application and selection process.
Researchers
Charlotte S. Alexander, J.D.
Connie D. and Ken McDaniel Women Lead Chair, Associate Professor of Law and Analytics, Institute for Insight, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University,
Charlotte S. Alexander holds the Connie D. and Ken McDaniel WomenLead Chair as a Professor of Law and Analytics at the Robinson College of Business and the College of Law at Georgia State University. She founded and directs the university’s Legal Analytics Lab, which brings together faculty from law, business, and data science to take on legal problems and questions using computational methods. Professor Alexander’s own scholarship focuses on civil litigation, and particularly employment litigation, using text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning to uncover patterns in case filing, progress, and resolution in both courts and private dispute resolution fora.
William C. Van Cleve
Associate Director, University of Washington Residency Program in Anesthesiology
Dr. Van Cleve is a clinical anesthesiologist at the University of Washington Medical Center. He also serves as associate program director of the UW residency program in anesthesiology. Dr. Van Cleve earned a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and behavior at Columbia University, and completed his medical training at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He completed both an internship and residency in pediatric medicine at the University of Washington / Seattle Children’s Hospital. He practiced pediatric medicine for two years before returning for residency training in anesthesiology. Dr. Van Cleve has a master’s degree in public health, focused on health services research. Dr. Van Cleve is board certified in pediatric medicine by the American Board of Pediatrics and in anesthesiology by the American Board of Anesthesiology.