Only one in five doctors in movies are women

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-08-29 01:00

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US researchers trawled through IMDB records of movies released between 1990 and 2020 and found a woefully low percentage of doctors in movies to be women. They say of the 1226 movies that featured 2295 physician-characters, only 426 (18.6%) were women, and the other 1869 (81.4%) were men. They found that most movies that depicted only one doctor would use a male actor, and in movies that had a doctor as lead, only 22 of the 99 films were female-led.

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Journal/
conference: JAMA Internal Medicine

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Emory University, USA

Funder: Dr Jagsi reported receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health, Komen Foundation, American Cancer Society, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and personal fees from the National Institutes of Health; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Greenwall Foundation; Dressman, Benziger, Lavelle Law; and Kleinbard, LLC and stock options from Equity Quotient outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.

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