Gender disparities in medicine: How popular literature mirrors 2020 society I’ve been looking for anything to take my mind off of 2020. During these tumultuous times of COVID-19, racial injustice, social unrest, and outright political upheaval, I’ve found myself turning back the clock to one of my favorite pastimes: reading. As I settled down into my favorite comfy chair on that rainy, quarantine-filled April day, I was reminded of some unsettling themes I’d discovered back in 2012. At that time, I was a happy, chipper senior in college, writing my thesis on Charles Dickens and his novel Bleak House. But as I dove into that dreary novel this past April, I again noticed an overarching, but central, theme: men are superior to women, especially in terms of health. In 2012, that theme wasn’t the focus of my paper, so I put the issues it raised aside and read on. Now, in 2020, Bleak House and all it represented came crashing down, and I realized I’d missed an opportunity to explore those biased, gender-based portrayals back in 2012. Now was time to face them head-on.