JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Gender imbalances in academia have been evident historically and persist today. For the past 60 years we witness the increase of participation of women in biomedical disciplines, showing that the gender gap is shrinking. However, early evidence suggests that women, including female researchers, are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with negative consequences to their productivity, indicating a sudden drop in women participation in biomedical research.

Objective:

The objective of this study is to test the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic has a disproportionate adverse effect on female researchers in biomedical fields.

Methods:

This is a retrospective observational study. We investigate the proportion of male and female researchers that publish scientific papers during the COVID-19 pandemic, by using data from biomedical preprint servers and selected Springer-Nature journals. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model has been used to estimate the expected proportions over time by correcting for temporal trends. A set of statistical methods such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) have been used to test the additional hypotheses.

Results:

A total of 78,950 papers from biorXiv, medrXiv and selected high-impact Springer-Nature journals by 466,836 authors have been analyzed. All the papers from the dataset are published between January 1st, 2019 and August 2nd, 2020. The proportion of women publishing in biomedical fields during the pandemic drops in average for 9.5% across disciplines and research topics (expected arithmetic mean y_est=0.38,; observed arithmetic mean y=0.35; standard error of the estimate, S_est=0.007; standard error of the observation, σ_x=0.004). The impact is particularly pronounced for papers related to COVID-19 research where the proportion of female scientists in the first author positions drops by 28.3% (y_est=0.38; y=0.27;S_est=0.007;σ_x=0.007). When looking at the last authors, the proportion of women writing about COVID-19 decreased by 19% (y_est=0.25; y=0.2;S_est=0.005;σ_x=0.007). Further, by geocoding author's affiliations, we show that the gender disparities become even more apparent when disaggregated by the country, up to 40% in some cases.

Conclusions:

Our findings document a decrease in proportion of female authors in biomedical sciences that publish the research papers during the global pandemic. This effect is particularly pronounced for the papers related to COVID-19 indicating that women are having less publications related to the COVID-19 research. A sudden increase in gender gap is persistent across ten countries with highest number of researchers. The results should be used to inform the scientific community of the worrying trend in COVID-19 research and the disproportionate effect the pandemic has to the female academics.