Background: Despite equal representation of genders within academic hospitalist groups, more hospitalist authors are men than women (Burden et al). In a study analyzing first and last authors in medical publications from all specialties between 2000 and 2017, only 31.6% of first authors and 19.4% of last authors were women (Bernardi et al). The COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated this gender gap in authorship: early in the pandemic, women were underrepresented in authorship of “fast-track” publications (Bittante et al). To determine the effect of COVID-19 on gender disparities in hospitalist authorship, we assessed the gender of hospitalist authors of COVID-19 related publications over the first year of the pandemic.
Methods: We reviewed the top four medicine (by impact factor), US-based journals from March 1, 2020 through February 28, 2021. All articles with a COVID-19-related keyword in the title and a US-based first or senior author were included. Author gender was determined based on pronouns used in the author’s online biography or on their hospital’s website. If we were unable to determine gender based on pronouns, the physician’s name was inserted into genderize.io to assist with gender determination. Because non-US based authors and non-physician authors often lacked online biographies and because non-English names are not validated for genderize.io, we included only US-based physician authors in analyses. We used descriptive statistics to compare the proportion of hospitalist authors who were men vs. women.
Results: Between March 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021, 596 articles containing a total of 1871 US-based physician authors were eligible for inclusion. The majority of physician authors (64.2%, 1201/1871) were men; 35.8% (670/1871) were women. Descriptions of gender by author position can be found in Table 1. Only 4% (74/1871) physician authors were hospitalists, and of these, 28.4% (21/74) were female. The gender breakdown by author position on publications is demonstrated in table 2.
Conclusions: There is a gender gap in COVID-19-related authorship, which is acutely apparent in hospital medicine. Though women made up 35.8% of all US-based physician authors, only 28.4% of hospitalist authors were women. In particular, representation of women in senior authorship was low. Gender disparities in publishing among hospitalists during the pandemic highlights the ongoing need to address underrepresentation of female authorship in our specialty.
