JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Gender is increasingly recognized as a crucial determinant of health and healthcare delivery. Integrating gender-sensitive content into medical education is essential for cultivating socially responsive, culturally competent, and clinically effective future physicians. However, limited research has examined how medical students conceptualize gender in clinical contexts, particularly through their own reflective narratives.

Objective:

This study aimed to explore the thematic landscape of gender-related perceptions among first-year medical students in Israel following a mandatory course in gender medicine. Using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), we investigated how students reflect on gendered dimensions of healthcare and how these reflections vary by gender and ethnicity.

Methods:

First-year medical students enrolled in the four-year path of medicine in Israel participated in a compulsory gender medicine course and were invited to submit anonymous written reflections. A total of 83 students (62.7% female, 37.3% male; 81.9% Jewish, 18.1% Arab) submitted responses, which were preprocessed and analyzed using LSA. Texts were lemmatized and vectorized to construct a term-document matrix, followed by singular value decomposition for dimensionality reduction. Ten latent topics were extracted, and thematic labels were assigned through an inductive, consensus-based coding procedure. Subgroup analyses were conducted by gender and ethnicity.

Results:

The overall analysis identified ten distinct and semantically coherent topics, with gendered patient-doctor interactions emerging as the most dominant theme (eigenvalue = 121.188; 28.1% variance). Other key themes included gender-specific diseases, transgender healthcare, gendered decision-making, and pharmacological differences by gender. Subgroup analyses revealed both overlapping and divergent patterns. Female students introduced themes such as gendered help-seeking and familial roles, health education, and gendered communication and advocacy. Male students uniquely articulated themes such as legal and ethical dimensions of gendered healthcare and perceived gender bias in biomedical research. Among Jewish students, new themes included population-level framing of gendered conditions and gendered youth expectations. Arabic students surfaced culturally specific themes such as modesty and cultural norms, paternal authority, and reproductive vulnerability.

Conclusions:

Thematic patterns in student reflections suggest that gender medicine curricula are effective in prompting critical engagement with diverse gendered realities in clinical care. The emergence of culturally grounded and gender-specific themes highlights the importance of tailoring educational interventions to reflect student diversity.