If you visit a medical school, it's more probable that the department head is a mustachioed man than a woman.
A recent study — aptly titled "Plenty of Moustaches but Not Enough Women: Cross Sectional Study of Medical Leaders" — in the British Medical Journal analyzed photos of 1,018 U.S. medical department leaders. Researchers from three institutions — Philadelphia-based University of Pennsylvania, Berkeley (Calif.) Law and the University of California, San Francisco — found 190 were mustachioed men and 130 were women. This equates to 19 percent men with mustaches and 13 percent women, according to The Washington Post.
To put it in comparison, the study authors also found less than 15 percent of men in the United States have facial hair.
Researches defined a mustache as "the visible presence of hair on the upper cutaneous lip," according to the report. This definition included standalone mustaches and mustaches in combination with other facial hair, but didn't include styles without hair on the upper lip, such as mutton chops. "We evaluated each leader for the presence of facial hair regardless of sex," the authors wrote, according to the report.
They then outlined a mustache index — the ratio of women to men with mustaches — that all medical schools should strive to improve. "We believe that every department and institution should strive for a mustache index that is greater than or equal to 1," the researchers wrote, according to the report.
The study was conducted as part of the British Medical Journal's annual Christmas issue full of quirky studies. Still, the research is real and the results are fascinating. Approximately 31 percent of psychiatry department leaders, 30 percent of pathology leaders and 26 percent of anesthesiology department leaders were mustachioed.
"We hope that these solutions will help increase moustache indices across all specialties by raising the number of women leaders while maintaining sufficient facial hair in our workplaces," the study authors conclude.
See below for a chart (courtesy of the British Medical Journal) of various facial hair styles analyzed by the authors.
