Yes, this is all very true.
And I can tell you, it’s not just older male physicians and patients that discount female physicians. Pediatrics is a female heavy field, and while I have gone into a more male “dominated” subspecialty (which means that the PICU is actually pretty equal in numbers between men and women, rather than the 70/30 female tilt in pediatric residencies), I have dozens of stories in which NURSES have discounted female docs. I and my male pediatrician colleagues have it so much easier than you would ever imagine. It’s probably not as drastic as a field such as surgery, but it’s definitely a difference.
Examples:
In the NICU, the bane of pediatric residents is the calls about residual feed volumes. your watching to see how these preemies are tolerating their feeds so before the next one, the nurse pulls on the feeding tube with a syringe to see how much is left over from the last feed. This happens every 3 hours. My female friends would get calls about each and every residual on every baby, while I would sleep through the night, wake up to find that the nurses had made a decision about discarding or refeeding on their own and then sent me the order to sign electronically the next morning.
My orders were much, much, much less likely to ever be questioned, even if they were wrong. I’d figure it out, come back, rewrite it and the nurses would say things like “oh yeah, we saw that and figured you didn’t really mean that, so we decided to wait”. Female colleagues would often have to deal with the consequences because the nurses would do the order, and then when woman came back, would get “well we thought it was wrong, but you’re the doctor…” or they would get paged immediately.
I don’t have a very good explanation for why nurses would act this way but I saw it consistently and across several instutitions. My suspicion is that, at least subconsciously, there’s an element of “well she’s not that smart, I could do her job” which is then coupled by the standard female/male dynamics that are a scripted part of our culture. Nevertheless, in sum, my female colleagues have to be better doctors than I do to get the same benefit of the doubt.