Gender Bias in Intensive Care
Intensive care provides specialised treatment and close monitoring for patients with serious illnesses, injuries, or life-threatening conditions. Clinicians may withdraw or withhold treatments when intensive care is not deemed beneficial for the patient. Additionally, intensive care is often expensive, and demand frequently exceeds available resources (Todorov et al., 2021). While factors such as older age or high illness severity scores may justify withdrawing or withholding intensive care, Block et al. (2019) found that even after adjusting for these variables, females are more likely to have their intensive care withdrawn.