Sex bias in the assessment of patient complaints.

This study investigates the contention that physicians have prejudicial attitudes toward female patients. One hundred twenty of 220 (58 percent) primary care physicians returned questionnaires that recorded their attitudes toward two hypothetical patients, one with a headache, one with abdominal pain. By changing only the gender of nouns and pronouns, two otherwise identical versions of each case had been constructed, one case describing a female patient, one a male patient. The physician subjects recorded their attitudes on a semantic differential scale designed to measure three dimensions of attitudes toward patients: authenticity, impression of severity of illness, and emotionality. The physicians judged the female patients to be more emotional (P less than .05) but no less authentic or ill than the male patients.