The impact of physician-patient gender match on healthcare quality: An experiment in China

Abstract

Despite growing evidence of gender disparities in healthcare utilization and health outcomes, there is a lack of understanding of what may drive such differences. We present novel evidence on the impact of physician-patient gender match on healthcare quality using the standardized patients (SPs) method in an experiment. The experiment collected 492 interactions between 18 standardized patients and 169 physicians in 63 community health centers in China's primary care setting, during August 17–28, 2017 and July 30–August 10, 2018. We find that, compared with female physicians treating female SPs, female physicians treating male SPs resulted in a 23.4 percentage-point increase in correct diagno..