The article titled “Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat” that appeared recently in The Upshot has drawn remarkable attention all across the medical community. This included an unusally active discussion at r/medicine, where many user pointed out that the party preferences of US physicians seem to correlate with previously estimated empathy scores, and demographic differences of the different specialties. Hence, I decided to explore these presumed connections. So what I basically did is that I took the data from the original article and compared the percentage of Republican party members across different specialties with the, empathy score, age, and gender distributions.

Let’s see the results:

Party preference correlates with empathy score and gender

For empathy scores of distinct specialties I had to rely on the results of a 2002 study as newer data were not available, and even this included only a handful of medical specialties. It is however clear, that specialties showing lower percentage of Republican party membership tended to score on average higher on the empathy score. This trend even proved to be statistically significant.

I have obtained data about the percentage of active physicians by sex and specialty from the 2012 Physician Specialty Data Book, however it needs to be pointed out that it contains information from 2010. Again a significant correlation was found, as increasing percentage of female physicians corresponded to lower prevalence of Republican party registration

No correlation with age

Data about the age of active physicians by each specialty was again obtained from the 2012 Physician Specialty Data Book, this time however no significant correlation could be observed.

In summary, this modest data analysis indeed supported the observations, that both the average degree of empathy of each specialty, and gender ratio, but interestingly not the age composition of US medical doctors does correlate with party preference.