Vigilance and validity: the necessity of assessment system surveillance to ensure equity in emergency medicine

Dayal and colleagues found persistent differential attainment of emergency medicine (EM) milestones between male and female residents amongst a large cohort of training programs, suggestive of significant bias. Since then, many groups have looked to their own contexts to seek out the presence or absence of these gender gaps. To this end, we would like to applaud Ingratta et al. in this issue of CJEM for contributing to this important work, given the emphasis many institutions are placing on this topic and measures to try and counteract these biases. This team sought to examine whether gender differences existed in the quality of their workplace-based assessments (WBAs). This work is important as part of a process of continuous quality improvement of a program of assessment as issues pertaining to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) require high-quality data as an input.