Differences in Narrative Language in Evaluations of Medical Students by Gender and Under-represented Minority Status

• Published in: Journal of general internal medicine : JGIM 2019-05, Vol.34 (5), p.684-691
• Main Authors: Rojek, Alexandra E., Khanna, Raman, Yim, Joanne W. L., Gardner, Rebekah, Lisker, Sarah, Hauer, Karen E., Lucey, Catherine, Sarkar, Urmimala
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Evaluation; Gender; Internal Medicine; Language; Medical personnel; Medical students; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Natural language processing; Schools; Students
• ISSN: 0884-8734; 1525-1497
• DOI: 10.1007/s11606-019-04889-9

Background In varied educational settings, narrative evaluations have revealed systematic and deleterious differences in language describing women and those underrepresented in their fields. In medicine, limited qualitative studies show differences in narrative language by gender and under-represented minority (URM) status. Objective To identify and enumerate text descriptors in a database of medical student evaluations using natural language processing, and identify differences by gender and URM status in descriptions. Design An observational study of core clerkship evaluations of third-year medical students, including data on student gender, URM status, clerkship grade, and specialty. Participants A total of 87,922 clerkship evaluations from core clinical rotations at two medical schools in different geographic areas. Main Measures We employed natural language processing to identify differences in the text of evaluations for women compared to men and for URM compared to non-URM students. Key Results We found that of the ten most common words, such as “energetic” and “dependable,” none differed by gender or URM status. Of the 37 words that differed by gender, 62% represented personal attributes, such as “lovely” appearing more frequently in evaluations of women ( p