A patient expressed surprised at a surgeon’s fee, considering she was “just a female doctor”.

Another completed the consultation with the female surgeon, gave consent for the procedure, but then wondered, “who’s going to do the surgery?”

Women surgeons have described a workplace where they face subtle gender biases from patients, colleagues and even from GPs during in-depth interviews with Sydney’s Macquarie University researcher Dr Katrina Hutchison (PhD).

As one surgeon said: “I think there must be some idea out there in the general practice world that ladies don’t do orthopaedics, don’t do hips and knees. They just do fingers or something.”