Table 1

Education and recruitment

Author	Year	Participants	Type of study	Study objective	Findings
Ourian et al 10	2011	Undergraduate students considering a career in surgery	Survey	To examine the impact of outreach at the undergraduate level in the form of a course hosted by surgeons (50% women surgeons) influence on women’s interest in medicine and surgery	Thirteen (100%) of the participants, 11 (85%) women found the outreach programme reaffirmed their decision to attend medical school and interest in surgery
Gifford et al 11	2014	Surgical residents in 13 programmes	Survey	To determine how often surgical residents consider leaving the programme	Women residents are more likely to consider leaving (OR 1.2; 95%; p=0.003)
Vertrees et al 12	2014	Graduates from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences	Survey	To determine if there are disparities among civilian and non-civilian women entering surgery and surgical subspecialties	Women in military medical programmes enter surgical training at the same rates as civilian programmes with an increase in rates (3.9% to 39% p=0.025)
Nebeker et al 13	2017	MSU Goal Consortium	Quantitative research	To identify gender differences in surgical residency	Greater impact is year of residency with first year residents leaning towards attitudinal learning objectives and later years choosing knowledge-based and skill-based learning objectives. Residents taught by women surgeons leaned towards knowledge based objectives over skill based.
Luc et al 14	2017	Medical and surgical residents	Quantitative survey	To identify the role of social media as a mentoring tool for women in surgery	Surgical residents identified using social media to build a network of mentors (p=0.031).
Fassiotto et al 15	2018	Graduate Medical Evaluation	Quantitative survey	To determine the difference if any in evaluation scores for women and men faculty	Women scored lower across the board for specialties with fewer women such as surgery (p≤0.001)