In the middle of March 2023, the US residency MATCH results were released. For those who don’t know what Match is, I’ll briefly explain.
The Match is an algorithm that pair intending medical residents in the US with prospective hospital for their residency training. Basically, the residents having sat for a series of licensing exams, interviews, and other requirements, would proceed to the ranking portal and submit a list of the hospitals they wish to practice in a hierarchal order. The hospitals too, having interviewed all their prospective residents, evaluated their results, would proceed to rank all the students in a hierarchal order. Then the algorithm would consider all the inputs, and match the prospective residents into one hospital each. Those who are unable to match would undergo a supplementary process called SOAP.
Since the match results came out came out days ago several institutions had been under intense scrutiny and fire and one of these schools is STANFORD UNI. Here are two screenshots of two specialty in Stanford: Surgery and Radiology. As you can see from the picture, all those who matched into Radiology are 100% MALES and those who got into surgery are 92% FEMALES.
This announcements started several arguments on twitter and was a means to rehash other issues surrounding medical education. There are different opinions on these results and some are as follows: Stanford hates white men which is why no white male was accepted into surgery residency, some believed the only way those ladies made it into the list was because they were diversity hires and were filling a quota, hence, they were not the most qualified but were fillers. Some brought the research article of Association of American Medical Colleges that showed that there are way less female surgeons than male. Other articles presented were papers saying patients have a greater survival chances if their surgeons were females.
Now, here is where things get messy. Of course, Stanford might have ranked their female applicants higher, but the major consideration of the algorithm is the schools the applicants ranked higher. So applicant’s choice gets more consideration than the hospital’s choice. That is, all the people who got into Stanford residency most likely ranked it their first choice and the algorithm considered that.
Secondly, it takes grit, hard work, and academic excellence to finish medical school. This means that all the applicants to a particular benchmark score had the academic qualification to match into the specialties they filled in for. However, other non-standardized factors affects how candidates match. A candidate may have 250 in the exam but did poorly in the interview. Like that, his chances of being matched at that particular hospital becomes lower because by the time the hospital would rank him, he might be lower on their own list. Apart from the exam and interviews other factors considered might include criteria like leadership experience, volunteering, CV, academic records whilst in medical school, etc.
I believe medicine should be merit-based. Irrespective of your race or gender or religion or sex, as long as you meet the required criteria, you should be able to study medicine and match into your performance-based residency choice. I do not believe that any of the ladies performed poorly but got in based on their gender or race. Yes, representation matters in medicine – just like in any other field, but we cannot sacrifice representation for competency. We cannot say because we want more females in medicine, then accept all the females who applied irrespective of their qualifications then deny all the males who applied irrespective of their qualification. Stanford would not be that inconsiderate to choose to train low-performing students in lieu of high-performing students.
A doctor is the bridge between life and death for a patient and it is necessary that they must have received all the necessary training. Also, the current statistics showed that there are more females in the US medical school than males. I am not surprised that more females matched into Stanford surgery than males. We should encourage levelling the playing field for everyone and letting the most competent win.