Moustache a bonus for men, study finds

The joke study found that moustaches outnumber women in positions of medical power. Photo / iStock

Women are still outnumbered in medical leadership by men with moustaches, a study has found.

If you think this study must be some kind of a joke, you're right.

Every year, the British Medical Journal puts out a special Christmas issue full of quirky (but still peer-reviewed) studies. They're all designed to make you chuckle. This year, there's a serious topic: Sexism in science and medicine.

The study, in short, found that moustaches - while increasingly rare, with the researchers citing reports that less than 15 per cent of men in the United States sport such facial hair - still outnumber women in positions of medical power.

"We defined a moustache as the visible presence of hair on the upper cutaneous lip and included both stand-alone moustaches [for example, Copstash Standard, Pencil, Handlebar, Dali, Supermario] as well as moustaches in combination with other facial hair [for example, Van Dyke, Balbo, The Zappa]," the researchers write in the study. "Department leaders with facial hairstyles that did not include hair on the upper lip (for example, Mutton Chops, Chin Curtain) were considered not to have a moustache. We evaluated each leader for the presence of facial hair regardless of sex."

The cross-sectional analysis of medical leaders was published by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Berkeley Law, and the University of California San Francisco. The researchers pointed out that women were once scarce in medical schools, but have made up about half of most classes for long enough that positions of leadership at health institutions should be looking a little more diverse by now. But in the world of US academic medicine, just 38 per cent of fulltime faculty, 21 per cent of full professors, and 16 per cent of deans are women.

"Moustachioed individuals significantly outnumber women as leaders of medical departments in the US," the researchers conclude in the study. "We believe that every department and institution should strive for a moustache index."

Of the 1018 medical department leaders examined by the study, only 190 were moustachioed men. But only 130 were women. That's 13 per cent women and 19 per cent men with visible hair on their upper lip. Bringing the moustache index up to 1 without adding more leadership positions would actually still leave us pretty far from gender parity.

Just five specialties had more than 20 per cent women department leaders, and these were obstetrics and gynaecology (36 per cent), paediatrics (31 per cent), dermatology (23 per cent), family medicine (21 per cent), and emergency medicine (21 per cent).

Moustache density was thickest in psychiatry (31 per cent), pathology (30 per cent), and anaesthesiology (26 per cent). But 10 specialties were 20 per cent moustachioed or more.

It's true that this isn't, like, the be-all-end-all argument that medical schools need more women at the top. It's clearly a gag, and as my roommate wisely said this morning, "I'm sure if someone made a chart, we'd see that moustaches are going down and women are on the up."

The study is inspired by more "serious" research, and the problem is a real one. "Sex discrepancies in leadership are distressingly common across specialties," the researchers write.

The researchers advise against improving the moustache index by pressuring male doctors to shave, as this would be discriminatory. Instead, they write, medical institutions might consider making their ranks more welcoming to qualified women.