Trends in Proportion of Women as Authors of Medical Journal Articles, 2008-2018

Abstract

Women remain underrepresented in academic medicine, especially among senior faculty. 1 We examined trends in women's representation as authors of medical journal articles, one key measure of academic success. 2 Methods | For 9 medical specialties (pediatrics, radiology, anesthesiology, obstetrics and gynecology, neurology, general medicine, dermatology, psychiatry, and oncology), we identified original research articles published between January 1, 2008, and August 1, 2018, in the 15 journals with the highest impact factor for 2016 (eTable in the Supplement). 3e also included 4 additional general medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, and The Lancet).We used validated software (Genderize.io[https://genderize.io]) to predict a gender and the probability of gender for an author's first name and used a threshold of 60% to assign gender as has been implemented in previous work.4 For more information, see eMethods in the Supplement.Because this study analyzed public data, it was exempt from institutional review board approval.We compared the change in proportion of female authors, female first authors, and female last authors among specialties using a 1-way analysis of covariance.We assessed the relationship between these proportions and journal impact factor using linear regression, adjusting for specialty.We determined the time to incident senior authorship among all authors who published in 2008 as a nonsenior author and used Kaplan-Meier log-rank analysis to compare the time to transition to last author between men and women, censoring at the end of the study period.All analyses were completed in R version 3.5.0(R Foundation for Statistical Computing) and all P values were 2-sided.

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