A story suggesting patients of female surgeons are less likely to die than those operated on by men made national headlines on Tuesday morning.
According to research by the University of Toronto, people who undergo surgery by female surgeons are less likely to die within a month than if they were operated on by male surgeons.
But questions have been raised over whether the study would have even been published – let alone carried out – had the findings come to the opposite conclusion.
Mike Buchanan, leader of Justice for Men and Boys – an organization campaigning for men’s rights and opposing feminism – said there “wouldn’t have been a story at all” if researchers had found that it was men who achieved a higher survival rate for patients.
The study found that patients are 12 percent less likely to die within 30 days of their operations if in the hands of female surgeons.
The research, published in the British Medical Journal, looked at more than a million patients in Ontario having operations such as appendectomies, knee and hip replacements and breast reductions.
Buchanan questioned the findings, saying: “It could be that there is a small difference but if there is, so what? What shall we change? Shall we just stop training male surgeons?”
Buchanan then hit out at the mainstream media and researchers for persistently showing “simply farcical” data that women are superior to men, while never reporting or investigating the opposite.
He claimed he presented substantial academic evidence during a House of Commons inquiry in 2012 debunking claims that gender diversity at board level increases overall performance in the financial sector. Not once in the past five years, however, has he managed to convince the mainstream media to run it.