Medicine

Meta-Research: COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected

Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark
Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Department of Radiation Oncology, Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson University, United States
Department of Emergency Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University, United States
Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Michigan, United States
Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, University of Michigan, United States

Jun 15, 2020

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58807

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1 figure, 1 table and 2 additional files

Figures

Figure 1

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COVID-19 papers have fewer female authors than papers from 2019 published in the same journals.

(**a–c**) Observed (bars) and estimated (crosses and error-bars) proportions of women among authors of 1,893 US papers on COVID-19 and 85,373 papers published in the same journals in 2019. The bars show differences in the observed proportions of women in the first-author position (a), the last-author position (b), and any author position (c), for papers published in 2020 COVID-19 papers (blue bars) versus papers from the same journals in 2019 (orange bars). All three panels suggest a decrease in the observed proportion of women. The crosses and error bars show the adjusted means and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) derived from mixed regression models with scientific journal as random effect parameter. (**d–f**) Adjusted means (crosses) and 95% CIs (error bars) derived from mixed regression models for the proportion of women in the first-author position (d), last-author position (e) and any author position (f), for papers published in 2019 (left-most crosses and error bars in each panel), papers published in March and April 2020 (middle), and papers published in May 2020 (right). For all models, there is a drop in March and April, followed by a partial resurgence in May. However, the uncertainty of the estimates make these comparisons inconclusive. See Supplementary file 1 for details of the mixed regression models used to estimate adjusted means and 95% CIs.

Tables

Table 1

Proportion of women authors on 2019 papers and COVID-19 papers by specialty.

Number of observations, N, and proportion of women by author list position for journals grouped by their specialty. The grouped columns show results by journal specialty for COVID papers published in 2020 (four rightmost columns) in contrast to papers from the same journals in 2019. Only papers with a US-based first and/or last author and clear gender for first and last author are included.

Journal specialty	2019 papers				COVID-19 papers
	N	Proportion of women			N	Proportion of women
	N	First author	Full group	Last author	N	First author	Full group	Last author
Dermatology	1811	0.44	0.42	0.37	72	0.46	0.41	0.31
Emergency medicine	1283	0.32	0.30	0.22	54	0.31	0.25	0.13
High impact general medicine	7142	0.41	0.42	0.39	194	0.31	0.37	0.35
Infectious diseases	1404	0.45	0.42	0.34	44	0.20	0.32	0.34
Internal medicine	19,980	0.36	0.33	0.25	484	0.33	0.32	0.24
Other basic sciences	6975	0.42	0.38	0.29	135	0.33	0.34	0.28
Other clinical sciences	21,869	0.40	0.37	0.31	429	0.38	0.38	0.35
Otolaryngology	1063	0.32	0.29	0.21	106	0.28	0.29	0.24
Pathology	869	0.46	0.43	0.32	66	0.27	0.37	0.30
Public health	11,015	0.47	0.41	0.35	99	0.33	0.41	0.37
Radiology	2262	0.37	0.33	0.27	60	0.25	0.28	0.17
Surgery	9700	0.21	0.20	0.13	186	0.26	0.22	0.16