Background

Gender medical knowledge is insufficiently integrated into university teaching in Germany. Gender awareness represents a key competence to integrate this knowledge into one's medical practice. This study is the first survey of the gender awareness of medical students in Germany.

Methods

From April to July 2021, a quantitative cross-sectional survey in an online format using the 'Nijmegen Gender Awareness in Medicine Scale' (2008) was conducted at four German universities (Charité Berlin, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, and the University of Cologne) with a varied implementation of teaching gender medicine. Students indicated their agreement or disagreement with assumptions and knowledge about the influence of gender in everyday medical practice (gender sensitivity), as well as gender role stereotypes towards patients and physicians (gender role ideology). 

Results

The 750 included participants showed a relatively high gender sensitivity and low gender role stereotyping towards patients and doctors. The curricular implementation of gender medicine of the universities showed to have a significant influence on the students' gender sensitivity, as well as on their gender role stereotyping towards patients. Students who reported having taken classes in gender medicine showed significantly higher level of gender sensitivity. Cis-males showed significantly lower gender sensitivity and significantly higher gender role stereotyping.

Conclusion

Implementation of gender medicine in the medical curriculum, attending courses on gender education and one’s gender have a significant impact on medical students' gender competencies. These results support the need for structural integration of gender in medical education and gender trainings at medical schools in Germany.

We undertook a quantitative cross-sectional survey from April to July 2021. The survey took place via an online survey at two faculties with regular study programs (Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) Jena and Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich) and two faculties with model study programs (Charité Berlin and the University of Cologne). Recruitment was via collaborations with the respective deans of studies, equal opportunity offices, and student council initiatives, as well as peer-to-peer recruitment via invitations via email, websites, and social media. The online survey included the used questionnaire N-GAMS to assess gender awareness as well as questions about socio-demographics (included in dataset).

The items are collected using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = "strongly disagree" to 5 = "strongly agree". For the analysis, items 2 to 11 and 13 of the GS subscale were reversed, so that a high score corresponded to high gender sensitivity (1=minimum; 5=maximum). In the GRI-P and GRI-D subscales, a high value corresponded to a strong gender role stereotyping towards patients and physicians, respectively (1=maximum; 5=minimum).

No specific software needed.

We used the statistical software SPSS® Statistics 27.0 for the analysis.