BLOG: Gender inequity in academic publishing ‘marginalizes an entire crucial talent pool’
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Gender equity has been identified as a problem in academic medicine for decades — including publishing — and it marginalizes an entire crucial talent pool.
Improving gender equity advances innovation, collaboration and progress. While the COVID-19 pandemic elevated the research efforts of men in academic medicine, women’s research efforts regressed due to increased competing pressures in career or clinical roles. Improved transparency and implementation of policies can improve gender parity and are a must for all areas of academia, including publishing.
Image: Adobe Stock
Women in Lymphoma
The mission of Women in Lymphoma (WiL) is to advocate for and promote equal gender representation in all aspects of academic medicine, globally.
One of WiL’s main missions is to increase women’s visibility at conferences, on panels, in lymphoma leadership committees and in research.
There are numerous opportunities for women to participate on the global scale. Disappointingly, there remain many panels, large clinical trials and steering committees where women make up a small proportion of key leaders. WiL has demonstrated that there is immense talent globally, and these disparities must be noted and addressed. WiL emphasizes celebrating the successes of our members, and we make it a point to highlight WiL contributions at all major meetings.
Previously, we have mapped metrics of conference presentations and educational events and are undertaking surveys of cooperative group gender balance.
Journal editorials, review articles and commentaries in prestigious journals are often undertaken by experts in their field and chosen by journal editorial boards for their expertise in a specific subject — another area where we felt there was gender inequity. We therefore wanted to examine this objectively and share the results.
Our analysis of author gender for review articles and editorials on lymphoma from eight top medical, hematology and oncology journals during a recent 5-year period showed that only 31% of more than 1,100 authors were women.
One journal had only one female author in 5 years.
The rates of female authors were even lower than we expected — particularly the 3% at the one journal — and consistent across most other journals.
Gender parity work
Despite an extensive global talent pool of female lymphoma experts, there is a significant amount of work to do to improve the gender parity in journal-invited commentaries and review articles.
WiL always aims to work collaboratively with both organizations and our colleagues to improve gender parity in academic medicine. The expertise of both male and female experts needs to be heard. Journals have made gains in this area, with more female editors in chief and rising numbers of women on editorial boards.
Additionally, some journals now collect gender metrics of their authors, as well as implementing policies to improve gender equity. Metrics are important, as our founding chair, Judith Trotman, MBChB, FRACP, FRCPA, professor of medicine at Concord Clinical School, Australia, reminds the WiL community that, “mapping the metrics changes the metrics.” As health care workers and researchers, WiL has the expertise and enthusiasm to continue to collect and share our gender data analyses in the future alongside our advocacy work.
WiL community expansion
The WiL community has grown to more than 1,000 members from 60 countries, and we are keen to expand.
Our hope at WiL is that even as the community grows in the future, the need for advocacy becomes redundant because we can achieve and maintain gender equity in our field, as well as across academic medicine.
In the interim, we will continue to believe that when it comes to gender equity, “where there is a WiL, there is a way.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts