Women in Surgical Residency Programs in Brazil: A Trend Analysis.

Introduction: There is a gender gap in the surgical field worldwide. Brazil and low- and middle-income countries generally tend to have a more profound gap. Therefore, we aim to assess the gender distribution in Brazilian surgical residencies.

Methods: From a national residencies' database, we collected residency entering years, names, and surgical subspecialties. We classified gender from the names using Gender API software and performed linear regression, binomial, and chi-square tests.

Results: From 81,979 doctors (1931-2020), 36.6% were women (P < 0.001). Of 13 subspecialties, regarding the absolute numbers of women, only neurosurgery and plastic surgery did not significantly differ between gender per year. There was a statistically significant growth in the proportional rates of female representation among most of the surgical residencies analyzed. Overall, the least women's representation was in urology (3.8%). From all subspecialties analyzed, both genders had a significant linear absolute increase over the years (P < 0.05), except for obstetrics-gynecology and pediatric surgery for men. Until 1990, all surgical programs had at least one woman resident, except for colorectal surgery.

Conclusions: Although there is an overall lack of women surgeons in Brazil, we observed an increase in women in surgical residencies. Therefore, the study may demonstrate a future change in the Brazilian gender equity scenario and reflect the growing representation of women in medicine in Brazil, except for some surgical specialties.