Table 2. Gender differences in skills acquisition of undergraduate medical students learning surgery.

Author	Year	Participants	Number of participants male/female	Type of study	Study objective	Findings
White	2012	4th year medical students and 1st year residents	Students 80/45; Residents 40/16	Retrospective analysis of outcomes	To investigate gender difference in the acquisition of laparoscopic skills	Women display initial lower performance, but respond to training as well as men and reach parity with men’s performance after training.
Lee	2012	3rd year medical students	100 (59/41)	Prospective	To examine the impact of innate manual dexterity on the career interests of medical students	5 female interested in surgical fields vs 16 male. No objective difference in dexterity in students interested in surgical fields when compared with those interested in nonsurgical fields.
Thorson	2012	4th year medical students	16/16	Prospective	To investigate the performance in laparoscopy simulation of students interested in surgery, vs not, and differences by gender	11male/6 females interested in surgery. Female students have less innate abilities to laparoscopy.
Kolozsvari	2011	Medical students	32 (19/13)	Prospective, intervention study	To evaluate the impact of gender on the learning curve for a fundamental laparoscopic task	Gender did not affect the learning curve for a fundamental laparoscopic task, while interest in surgery and perceptual abilities did influence early performance.
Szczepanik	2010	Surgeons and medical students	17 surgeons 44 students	Prospective	To assess motor coordination skills in medical students, surgical residents and attending surgeons	No gender differences in coordination skills.
Adamczyk	2009	1st year medical students	850 (Unknown proportion male/female)	Survey and retrospective review of examination results	To investigate how students use multimedia tools to support their learning during a gross anatomy dissection course	45% of male and 33% of female students used the multimedia-learning tool, both groups found it equally valuable. No gender differences in performances. No significant correlation between the use of the multimedia learning tool and the exam performance of students.
Shane	2008	4th year medical students and 1st year residents	26 (17/9)	Prospective	To investigate if previous video game experience facilitates acquire new surgical skills	Previous video game experience shortens time to achieve proficiency on two tasks on a validated surgical simulator. Women perform worse than men.
Madan	2008	Preclinical medical students	51	Prospective	To investigate if baseline laparoscopic skills scores could be predicted in an inanimate box trainers and virtual-reality trainers	No gender differences in box trainer, male performed better in virtual-reality trainer.
Table 2 (Cont.)
Author	Year	Participants	Number of participants male/female	Type of study	Study objective	Findings
Elneel	2008	Medical students	50	Prospective	To determine innate dexterity and ambidexterity across handedness and gender	Right-handed males exhibited a greater level of ambidexterity than left-handed males and right-handed females, and more-efficient task performance as measured by execution time.
Lee	2007	3rd and 4th year medical students	2395 (949/1328)	Survey	To identify variables associated with clinical clerkship grades	Lower grades for females in internal medicine and surgery, lower grades for males in ob/gyn and psychiatry.
Rosenthal	2006	Medical students	20 (12/8)	Prospective, intervention study	To evaluate the performance curves on repetitive trials for a laparoscopic task on a simulator, and the inter-individual differences after training	The performance curves for some of the simulator measurements were very close to logarithmic curves, and there were significant inter-individual differences in performance at the end of the repetitive trials. No significant gender differences observed.
Donnon	2005	1st and 2nd year medical students	42 (21/21)	Randomized control	To study the effect, between genders, of cognitive imaging as a teaching method in learning a surgical technique.	Males tended to perform better than females in completing tasks that required the use of visual-spatial manipulation of the instruments within a simulated laparoscopic environment.
Madan	2005	1st and 2nd year medical students	68	Prospective, intervention study	To explore if baseline laparoscopic surgery skills can be predicted.	No gender differences in laparoscopic skills. It is difficult to predict baseline laparoscopic surgery skills.
Healy	2005	Medical students	148 (48/90)	Prospective observational study	To evaluate the utilization of the web-based program	Electronic learning complements traditional teaching methods in undergraduate surgical teaching. No significant gender differences in the utilization of online access. Student utilization of the program was not associated with improvements on final year examination results.
Enochsoon	2004	Medical students	17(8/9)	Prospective, intervention study	To investigate factors that can predict performance in simulated gastroscopy	No significant gender-specific differences in the performance of the simulator, although there was a trend toward men performing better in two of the metrics, time of endoscopy, and efficiency of screening.
Grantcharov	2003	Novel residents	25 (18/7)	Prospective, intervention study	To identify factors influencing surgeons' performance in a computer simulator for laparoscopy	Men completed the tasks in less time than women, but there was no statistical difference between the genders in the number of errors and unnecessary movements.
Helenius	2002	Last year medical students	404 (138/266)	Survey	To gather information on the basic surgical skills of graduating medical students and to establish the factors influencing the students' competence	Final-year medical students have good theoretical knowledge of basic surgical procedures, but the successful performance rates range from 1 to 90%. Males performed surgical procedures significantly more often than females. Working experience enhanced the surgical skills, but research experience impaired the learning of the procedures. The systematic use of logbooks seems to be useful.
Mehrabi	2000	4th year medical students	103 (78/72)	Prospective, intervention study	To develop and evaluate a Computer Based Training (CBT) program for student	No gender difference in the outcome. CBT modules are an appropriate future teaching and learning system.