“My wife, the surgeon, would say that is because women are generally in less risky and less challenging areas of surgery.”
So here we have a hearsay statement of opinion based upon personal experience, presented to challenge a statitically proven fact favoring female competence.
This not only promotes the anecdotal and emotional over the larger facts, but confirms what I have come to expect and, in a perverse way, to enjoy, in this forum.
It rarely fails in its tendency to both provoke without foundation and disappoint simultaneously.
Well, counselor, it’s not hearsay both because we’re not in the courthouse and because it’s a statement against her own interest as a female surgeon. And I’m just an engineer who served on a grand jury, not lawyer. You probably need to go back to your evidence class and brush off the books.
Her substantive response to you is the basis for her belief is she can’t recruit otherwise excellent female surgeons to the risky specialties like trauma because the prefer a more predictable practice.
She adds that the avoidance of hard cases by the typical doctor (male or female) is a known flaw in studies judging doctors from success rates, most notably oncology and (something you undoubtedly will be familiar with as someone who is clearly shriveled up) infertility, because the very best doctors take on the harder cases, while the mediocre take on the lay ups. This, ironically, gives the best doctors the worst success ratings.
This flaw in your cited study would be fun to exploit if you put up its propents on a witness stand, assuming your boss would ever let you near the courtroom.