Men with mustaches hold more of the leadership positions at academic medical centers than women, a new study has found.
Penn Medicine called the "quirky" study somewhat "tongue in cheek" after researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine determined that 13 percent of women hold upper-level positions compared to the 20 percent of men with mustaches. Unusual though the study may be, it is yet another way to highlight the gender gap in medicine.
"The lack of women in leadership roles in medicine is well-documented, but despite the eccentricities of the study, our results show that even when you focus solely on men with mustaches — which are rare — women are still outnumbered across various specialties," lead study author, Mackenzie Wehner, a dermatology resident physician at Penn Medicine, said in a statement.
The mustaches included "unusual mustaches, like the Fu Manchu style, and men who have beards or
really bushy sideburns," NBC News reported.
"We defined a mustache as the visible presence of hair on the upper cutaneous lip and included both stand alone mustaches (for example, Copstash Standard, Pencil, Handlebar, Dali, Supermario) as well as mustaches in combination with other facial hair (for example, Van Dyke, Balbo, The Zappa)," researchers told NBC.
"The findings are consistent with the results of a recent study of over 90, 000 academic physicians, which showed that women are less likely to be full professors even after adjustment for age and research productivity," the Penn Medicine release said.
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