Clinical skills as demonstrated by a comprehensive clinical performance examination: Who performs better - Men or women?

Purpose: Determine whether gender predicted student performance on a clinical performance examination (CPX) when controlling for pre-matriculation and medical school performance. Method: A sixteen-station CPX, utilizing standardized patients (SPs), was administered to the fourth-year students three successive years at one United States medical school. Scores for each student by discipline and skills across stations were generated. Bivariate correlation and multiple regression analyses were performed to determine relationships between students' scores and pre-matriculation information (age, gender, MCAT, and undergraduate GPA) and medical school performance (first-, second- and third-year GPA, and USMLE Step 1). Results: The CPX mean score for all students was 65.1% (SD 6.2). The mean total score for men (n = 182) and women (n = 93) was 64.0% and 67.0%, respectively. Being a woman, positively affected a student's score in two models controlling for pre-matriculation and medical school performance by 2.8% or 0.47 standard deviations (SD) and 2.3% or 0.39 SD, respectively. Women scored numerically higher than men in all seven disciplines (internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, pediatrics and psychiatry, p < 0.05) and for nine skills across all stations (introduction, history, physical examination, counseling and interpersonal, p < 0.05). Conclusion: Women performed better than men on the University of Kentucky CPX. Being a woman was a positive and independent predictor of performance.