Should patients care about gender when choosing a doctor? Will they be better off with a man, a woman, or another gender?
People have been trying to answer this question one way or another since at least the 1990s. Unfortunately, pretty much all the published data consider gender as a binary variable, so for now, our evidence-based conversation is limited to men and women.
One of the earliest major papers investigating how the care provided by women may differ from that of men was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. The investigators looked at visits for almost 100,000 women patients with over 1200 physicians and assessed how often Pap smears and screening mammograms were done. They found that women physicians were more likely than men physicians to order both.