Is there a gender gap in global rheumatology leadership?

Abstract

Dear Editor, While the rheumatology workforce in many countries is increasingly becoming gender-balanced [1], advancing equity in academic recognition is still an unmet need. A report from 2015 estimated that 66% of fellows and 41% of rheumatologists in the USA are women. The same report predicted that by 2025 women will comprise the predominant majority of the rheumatology workforce [2]. Similarly, in many European countries, including Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and the UK, women comprise >50% of the rheumatology workforce [3]. Despite being in the majority, women in rheumatology are underrepresented in leadership positions [2–4]. The gender equity in academic rheumatology initiative has sparked discussions on the effect of inequity in academia on assignment to leadership roles [3–5]. To explore whether a gender gap exists in the global rheumatology leadership, we undertook a cross-sectional review of gender representation among the presidents of regional rheumatology leagues, namely the ACR, African League Against Rheumatism (AFLAR), Asia-Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology (APLAR), the EULAR and the Pan-American League of Associations for Rheumatology (PANLAR).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.