By AKIKO OKAZAKI/ Senior Staff Writer
October 22, 2025 at 07:00 JST
A female surgeon, right, performs an operation. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Female surgeons in Japan get fewer opportunities than their male counterparts to perform surgery, more so when it comes to complex operations, a study showed.
While the disparity started to diminish after the Japanese Society of Gastroenterological Surgery moved to address the situation in 2021, male surgeons still dominated in high-difficulty surgeries.
Chie Tanaka, a Nagoya University associate professor of gastrointestinal surgery, and other researchers analyzed a database covering over 95 percent of all surgeries in Japan to compare the number of operations performed by male and female surgeons in 2015, 2019 and 2023.
Although the gender disparity had all but disappeared for low-difficulty surgeries by 2023, it still existed for medium-risk procedures, even though more operations were being performed by female surgeons.
Male surgeons continued to handle a significantly larger volume of high-risk operations.
Younger doctors are turning away from gastrointestinal surgery--and, consequently, JSGS membership--due to demanding working hours, among other reasons.
While women constitute less than 10 percent of the total JSGS membership, they are significantly better represented among younger members, making up over 20 percent of the under-30 group.
The disparity is pronounced in complex surgeries, in part because operations tend to last many hours and involve heavy workloads in terms of postoperative care. Consequently, these cases are often assigned to male surgeons who operate under fewer time constraints.
Female surgeons raising children tend to shy away from such cases for fear they may not be able to fulfill their responsibility to their patients.
Additionally, there is a notable scarcity of female surgeons in leadership roles within university medical offices, which dictate the allocation of posts.
A gender bias might be at work in the way surgeons are assigned to hospitals that offer advanced surgeries.
“It is crucial to develop an environment that allows both male and female surgeons to show their full abilities,” said Emiko Kono, an assistant professor of gastroenterological surgery with Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University.
Kono is one of the coauthors of a research paper describing the findings from the study.
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