Addressing global gender inequities in academic publishing critical for women in medicine
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Key takeaways:
- Researchers found that more than half of publications studied had women as first and corresponding authors.
- Women represented last authors in only 39.3% of publications studied.
Women continue to be underrepresented globally in authorship of oncology publications, specifically as senior authors, according to study results.
The findings indicate a need for efforts to fix gender disparities in oncology publication leadership, researchers concluded.
‘Women’s ability to succeed’
“This work was started through the Women in Academic Medicine group at the University of Miami with the goal to better understand, on a more global scale, what gender inequities persist in publishing,” Morgan S. Levy, MD, MPH, researcher at University of Kentucky, told Healio. “As women who all practice in oncology-related fields, we were interested in publications in these fields specifically. The idea of looking at the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews was based on the thought that research funding is often a barrier to women’s ability to succeed in academic publishing and that systematic reviews do not require the traditional laboratory setup with substantial capital investment.”
Levy and colleagues sought to evaluate global longitudinal publication trends in oncology by gathering data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) between 2001 and 2020.
The retrospective bibliometric analysis included 548 oncology publications.
Primary outcomes included the numbers and percentages of women as first, last and corresponding author. Secondary outcomes included differences in authorship between countries and percentages of women authors throughout time assessed via the Cochran-Armitage trend test.
‘Women remain underrepresented’
Between 2001 and 2010, more than half of the publications studied (52.6%) had women as first authors and corresponding authors (50.9%). Whereas women constituted only 39.3% of last authors on publications vs. 60.7% of men represented as last authors (P < .001).
However, the percentage of women as last and corresponding authors increased significantly during the past 20 years (P < .05).
Results also showed that countries, such as the Netherlands and Australia, consistently exhibited representation of women in first, corresponding and last authorship. Conversely, other countries, such as Italy and China, showed consistently low rates of women as authors overall.
“There were some areas in which female representation in authorship changed over time; however, women remain underrepresented, particularly in senior authorship,” Levy said. “Overall, the findings track with the overall moderate increase in female representation at more junior levels within academic medicine while the attainment of higher-ranking accolades lags behind.”
Researchers reported limitations of the study, including that all publications studied are subject to selection biases inherent to the CDSR database.
‘Over-mentored, under-sponsored’
Based on these findings, researchers concluded that, “Systematic, substantive changes focused on early and consistent correction of the key variables influencing first and senior authorship on research publications is likely to be a key contributor to enhanced global gender equity in academic hematology-oncology.
“In academic medicine, women are over-mentored and under-sponsored,” Levy added.
“Finding ways to create more meaningful ways for women in academic oncology to increase academic productivity in a way that also leads them to more senior roles in research and promotion in academic rank remain necessary,” she said. “I’d like to thank two of my mentors for this work — Marilyn Huang, MD, head of the division of gynecologic oncology at UVA Health, and Asha Pillai, MD, chair of hematology, hematologic malignancies and transplantation, and global development at Regeneron. Both were instrumental in developing this project in a way that meaningfully captures current gender disparities in academic publishing in oncology, and are key role models of mine as leading women physician scientists in oncology.”
For more information:
Morgan S. Levy, MD, MPH, can be reached at morganlevy@uky.edu.
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