A new study suggests that in medical leadership, women are still outnumbered by men who have mustaches.
The kind-of-joke study is real in itself. Every year, it was accustomed by the British Medical Journal to publish special Christmas issues that are odd. This year, one of their researches suggest that there may be sexism in the field of science and medicine.
In the said study, it was stated that the number of men with mustaches in the US can still outnumber the total number of women in the leadership of medical field. The report may be so surprising accounting the fact that there are only 15 percent of men in the US with facial hairs.
The study was conducted by examining the photographs of 1,018 department leaders at 50 medical schools in the country. The said schools that were inspected had the most research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
The examination showed that for all the medical heads, there are 137 women and there are 190 men with mustaches. That is 13 percent women compared to the 19 percent of men with beard.
In a statement, researchers said the imbalance between men with mustaches and women in the medical area.
"Mustachioed individuals significantly outnumber women as leaders of medical departments in the US. We believe that every department and institution should strive for a mustache index ≥1," the researchers confirmed.
The study also displayed that there are only about five specialties in medicine were women leaders are about 20 percent above. These are obstetrics and gynecology in which women are 36 percent, dermatology with 23 percent females, family medicine with 21 percent, emergency medicine with 21 percent, and pediatrics 31 percent women leaders.
The researchers stated that their study can have several drawbacks and limitations. Misclassification of the mustaches is one. Their data may also be out of date as they only got the information in the different institution's website.
