You write that "Studies have shown that the suicide rate among male doctors is 40 percent higher than among men overall and that female doctors take their own lives at 130 percent the rate of women in general."

In other words, the rate is 40% higher for men and only 30% higher for women.

And yet, if the average reader were to simply glance over this sentence (as most people do when reading articles on the internet or even in print), he or she could quite easily gain precisely the opposite impression, namely that the rate is higher for female doctors.

Was this accidental or was it an intentional choice? I'm just interested, since the sentence (with its ues of completely non-comparable statistics) jumped out at me.

Thanks for pointing this out, because I did exactly that (I was skimming through Slate on my lunch break, but not reading carefully). I didn't think about it too long, but I was back of the mind ruminating on possible explanations for (what I thought was) such a large disparity, and how that could apply to female lawyers (which is what I am). Glad to see that the difference is not anything like what I understood.