According to a retrospective study of 24,778 critically ill adults admitted to Ontario hospitals in 2001 and 2002, women over the age of 50 are one-third less likely to be admitted to ICUs, and then once in ICUs are far less likely to received lifesaving medical interventions like mechanical ventilation and pulmonary artery catheterization than their male counterparts. Even when women are admitted to the ICU, they spend less time there (where the nurse-patient ratio is one-to-one) and more time in the hospital overall. The unhappy outcome? The study found that critically ill women were 20 percent more likely to die in the ICU than critically ill men.

The intriguing thing about this study is that it comes closer to gleaning bias in the medical treatment of women. Past studies have noted differences in the treatment of men and women, but it’s hard to know to what extent patient behavior and individual diagnosis played into the differences. But since the admission to the ICU is supposed to be a matter of medical necessity, it’s a particularly interesting area of inquiry. Still, the origin of the differences in treatment remains a mystery. One of the researchers, Dr. Robert Fowler, told National Post that he suspected bias in treatment springs from healthcare workers viewing elderly women as frail and elderly men as fighters: “You don’t hear ‘frail’ and ‘man’ in the same sentence nearly as much.”