Table 5

Women in surgical specialty

Author	Year	Participants	Type of study	Study objectives	Findings
Caniano et al 40	2004	Paediatric women surgeons	Survey	To maintain surgery and paediatric surgery as a premier career choice	Seventy-nine (83%) surveys returned identified insufficient protected time, clinical load, on-call, lack of mentorship and departmental support as barriers.
Benzil	2009	American Association of Neurological Surgeons	White Paper	To attract women to neurosurgery services	Mentors, role models and exposure can encourage women in medical school to consider the specialty
Hamilton et al 42	2012	Women surgeons	Survey	To identify aspects of pregnancy and childbearing factors that impact residency and clinical practice	Women orthopaedic surgeons/residents who work more than 60 hours a week are at higher risk for preterm deliveries compared with the general population
Dageforde et al 43	2012	Women medical residents	Survey	To find the elements which will encourage women to vascular surgery and leadership	Overall perceptions of women in surgery need to change
Grimsby and Wolter44	2013	Urology resident	Commentary	To explore the experience of urology residency for a woman	Less than 10% of all urologist are women urologist and there needs to be mentorship and exterminating sexual harrassment
Hill et al 45	2013	Graduate Medical Students and American Academy of Orthopedic Surgical Residents	Survey	To understand what residents think of orthopaedic surgery and what hinders women from choosing the specialty	Women constitute 13.2% of all orthopaedic specialty and 15% of full-time faculty. Increased exposure to orthopaedic specialty and mentorship can encourage women to enter the specialty
Renfrow et al 41	2016	American Association of Neurological Surgeons	Retrospective survey	To characterise the enrollment, attrition, and post attrition	Women attrition rates in neurosurgery are similar to other specialties but greater than men. Twelve percent of the surgical residents from 2000 to 2009 were women.
Weiss and Teuscher46	2016	Council of Orthopedic Residency Directors within	Survey	To understand the influence of maternity policy and choosing a surgical specialty	45 programme directors responded (31%) of those 80% have written maternity policies and 36% have formal and informal; 49% have paternity leave policy. There is a general lack of uniformity, which warrants transparency and discussion.
Garza et al 47	2017	Plastic Surgery Program Directors	Survey	To investigate issues related to pregnancy	A return rate of 61.36% (54/88) identified 36.54% programmes have formal maternity policy and 20% have a policy for breast feeding. The rest of the directors identified multiple barriers to maternity leave policy, which include clinical training, coverage, workload burden, administrative support.
Chambers et al 55	2018	Orthopaedic surgery	Quantitative survey	To quantify discrepancy across surgical specialties among residents and faculty	Orthopaedic surgery has the lowest rates of women in training (14%), less than 1% of women medical residents choose orthopaedics, 17.8% women orthopaedic surgeons are faculty, 8.7% professors of orthopaedics are women and 6.5% of the AAOS are women.