Gender Bias, Language, & Medicine - Karoline Irschara

Findings from a Linguistic Analysis of German Radiology Reports
Public Lecture with Karoline Irschara, Stiftung Südtiroler Sparkasse Global Fellow 2023 at the Center for Advanced Studies of Eurac Research
Abstract:
Domains in which healthcare is done rely on a variety of forms of communication. However, language is crucially involved in the unconscious perpetuation of biases, which in turn are pervasive in medicine, as evidenced by emerging knowledge constitutions in the field of gender medicine. For example, gender bias is pervasive in terms of care, access to cutting-edge medicine, and even medication. Discourse linguistic research attempts to trace connections between social factors and language use. It thus raises questions such as: Are there linguistic patterns that indicate such inequalities? Are texts about patients written differently depending on who is being treated? Such questions will be addressed in the lecture, in which some results of an interdisciplinary research project (MedCorpInn) will be presented. To answer the above questions, 5 million radiology reports of the University Hospital Innsbruck were processed as a linguistic corpus and analyzed with discourse, corpus, and gender linguistic methods.