Gender Bias in Medical School and the ER

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In this episode you’ll hear about: gender and sex bias in medical school textbooks and in medical training and how that shows up in the ER, the work Dr. McGregor is doing to change that, and a discussion of the book Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health and What We Can Do About It.

Our guest is: Alyson J. McGregor MD, MA, FACEP. Dr. McGregor is a women’s health pioneer focusing on the concept of sex and gender difference in the delivery of acute medical care. She is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and the co-founder and director for the Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine (SGEM) at Brown University’s Department of Emergency Medicine, and a co-founder for the national organization Sex and Gender Women’s Health Collaborative. Dr. McGregor’s research focus is on the effects that sex and gender have on emergent conditions. She has been an advocate for this model nationally, speaking widely to medical students and professionals and laypeople. She has written or co-written over sixty peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals on the topic of sex and gender as well as given a widely popular TEDx Talk, and authored and edited books.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

• Sex and Gender Women’s Health Collaborative Sex and Gender Women’s Health Collaborative.
• Sex Matters: How Male-Centric Medicine Endangers Women’s Health and What We Can Do About It, by Alyson McGregor, MD
• Sex and Gender in Acute Care Medicine, edited by Alyson J. McGregor
• Dr. McGregor’s TedxTalk: Her TEDx talk, “Why Medicine Often Has Dangerous Side Effects for Women,”
• Premed Prep: Advice From a Medical School Admissions Dean by Sunny Nakae
• Gender and Our Brains, by Gina Rippon
• The Medicine Channel on New Books Network
• Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training, by Kelly Underman
• The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University