Exploring Gender Disparities in Time to Diagnosis

Abstract: Sex and gender-based healthcare disparities contribute to differences in health outcomes. We focus on time to diagnosis (TTD) by conducting two large-scale, complementary analyses among men and women across 29 phenotypes and 195K patients. We first find that women are consistently more likely to experience a longer TTD than men, even when presenting with the same conditions. We further explore how TTD disparities affect diagnostic performance between genders, both across and persistent to time, by evaluating gender-agnostic disease classifiers across increasing diagnostic information. In both fairness analyses, the diagnostic process favors men over women, contradicting the previous observation that women may demonstrate relevant symptoms earlier than men. These analyses suggest that TTD is an important yet complex aspect when studying gender disparities, and warrants further investigation.