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In India, men are more likely than women to have active tuberculosis but are less likely to be diagnosed and notified to national tuberculosis programmes. We used data from standardised patient visits to assess whether these gender differences occur because of provider practice.

We sent standardised patients (people recruited from local populations and trained to portray a scripted medical condition to health-care providers) to present four tuberculosis case scenarios to private health-care providers in the cities of Mumbai and Patna. Sampling and weighting allowed for city representative interpretation. Because standardised patients were assigned to providers by a field team blinded to this study, we did balance and placebo regression tests to confirm standardised patients were assigned by gender as good as randomly. Then, by use of linear and logistic regression, we assessed correct case …