Are female authors under-represented in primary healthcare and general internal medicine journals?

Paul Sebo; Carole Clair

doi:10.3399/bjgp21X716249

This article has a correction. Please see:

Corrections - August 01, 2022

Gender inequalities persist on a large scale in academic medicine. Compared with their male counterparts, female researchers generally receive lower salaries¹^,² and less funding for their studies.³ They also have slower career progression.⁴ The representation of female and male authorship is a simple measure and is a surrogate marker that reflects the level of gender gap in research.

We selected all interventional and observational studies and all reviews published in 2016–2020 in all primary healthcare (PHC) journals with a JCR 2019–2020 impact factor >1 (N = 16 journals) and in the same number of high-impact general internal medicine (GIM) journals. We then used Gender API (https://gender-api.com/en/) to determine the gender of the first authors. Finally, we calculated the proportion of articles authored by female researchers and compared the data by year of publication and by medical discipline using logistic regression adjusted for intracluster correlations (journal).

We retrieved 13 440 articles, the names of the authors being available for 13 329 of them. First authors’ gender could be determined for 13 173 articles (98.8%). The proportion of female first authors ranged from 47.7% to 71.6% in PHC and from 24.3% to 53.3% in GIM. It was <50% in only one of 16 PHC journals and >50% in only one of 16 GIM journals. The difference between the two journal groups was statistically significant (53.7% for PHC versus 41.2% for GIM, adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.66 [95% CI = 1.03 to 2.66], P-value = 0.04). The proportion of female first authors varied only slightly during the period under review (2020 compared with 2016: AOR = 0.98 [95% CI = 0.79 to 1.20], P-value = 0.81 for PHC, and AOR = 0.99 [95% CI = 0.90 to 1.09], P-value = 0.77 for GIM).

These results can be explained in part by a higher proportion of women in leadership positions in PHC compared with other medical disciplines.⁵ They highlight the important contribution of female scholars to scientific knowledge in PHC.

Our study has two main limitations. First, gender assignment relied on a gender detection tool and not on self-determination, and the risk of misclassification was therefore not excluded. However, Gender API was shown to be very accurate.⁶ Second, gender determination on the basis of first names raises ethical considerations by simplifying the concept of gender.⁷

REFERENCES

1.↵
1. Jagsi R,
2. Griffith KA,
3. Stewart A,
4. et al.
(2012) Gender differences in the salaries of physician researchers. JAMA 307, 22, 2410–2417.
OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed
2.↵
1. Ly DP,
2. Seabury SA,
3. Jena AB
(2016) Differences in incomes of physicians in the United States by race and sex: observational study. BMJ 353, i2923.
OpenUrl Abstract/FREE Full Text
3.↵
1. Ley TJ,
2. Hamilton BH
(2008) Sociology. The gender gap in NIH grant applications. Science 322, 5907, 1472–1474.
OpenUrl Abstract/FREE Full Text
4.↵
1. Carr PL,
2. Gunn CM,
3. Kaplan SA,
4. et al.
(2015) Inadequate progress for women in academic medicine: findings from the National Faculty Study. J Womens Health 24, 3, 190–199.
OpenUrl PubMed
5.↵
1. Association of American Medical Colleges
The state of women in academic medicine. https://www.aamc.org/members/gwims/statistics/ (accessed 10 Jun 2021).
6.↵
1. Santamaría L,
2. Mihaljević H
(2018) Comparison and benchmark of name-to-gender inference services. PeerJ Comput Sci 4, e156.
OpenUrl PubMed
7.↵
1. Matias JN
How to ethically and responsibly identify gender in large datasets. MediaShift, http://mediashift.org/2014/11/how-to-ethically-andresponsibly-identify-gender-in-large-datasets/ (accessed 10 Jun 2021).