Why Do We Need More Female Doctors? Gender Concordance and Lockdown

Uncertainty exemplifying events such as lockdowns bring disruptions in healthcare, including influencing the choices in seeking consultation. Many past studies have shown that the gender of a doctor plays an essential role in patients’ preferences and satisfaction. These preferences may become more apparent in uncertain times (e.g., lockdowns). Therefore, in this study, we examine the effect of lockdowns on the patient-doctor gender concordance (i.e., same gender preference). Collaborating with one of the largest health tech firms and using a large dataset from India, we attempt to answer this question. Our year-long data consists of 396,975 doctor-day observations of 5.47 million prescriptions for 1,800 male doctors and 136 female doctors practicing in 11 specialties. Our results suggest that, on average, female doctors observe a nearly 11% decrease in gender concordance compared to male doctors’ concordance post lockdown. Upon investigating further, our results show that this change is driven by the choice of male patients, meaning relatively more male patients choose to see female doctors, The preference of female patients did not change significantly. Our result suggests that male patients look for female doctors in uncertain times. We test this mechanism by studying female-only patient specialties i.e., gynecology), male patients dominated specialties (i.e., cardiologist), and patients (kids) who are less likely to choose doctors (i.e., pediatrician), where we find support for our proposed mechanism. This effect remains persistent (albeit smaller but significant) even after a quarter of un-lockdown. We rule out alternative explanations and show that this effect is not due to specialty, new patients, or different tiers of cities. Our research shed new light on why we need female doctors, particularly in stressful situations.Note: Funding Information: None.Conflict of Interests: None.