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One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, pages 791–796 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Gender and sex analysis is increasingly recognized as a key factor in creating better medical research and health care1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million medical research papers, our study examined the potential link between women’s participation in medical science and attention to gender-related and sex-related factors in disease-specific research. Adjusting for variations across countries, disease topics and medical research areas, we compared the participation of women authors in studies that do and do not involve gender and sex analysis. Overall, our results show a robust positive correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis. These findings corroborate discussions of how women’s participation in medical science links to research outcomes, and show the mutual benefits of promoting both the scientific advancement of women and the integration of gender and sex analysis into medical research.

Despite a burgeoning scholarship, gender and sex differences remain unaddressed in large areas of medical research. Consider, for instance, the paradigmatic example of biological sex differences in cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death among adult populations in the Western world. Since the 1980s, the annual number of cardiovascular disease-related deaths has been higher for women than for men; however, women continue to be underrepresented as participants in clinical trials8,9,10. A similar pattern is found in cancer research, where male research subjects dominate the trials11, or in studies of cell tissue and laboratory animals, in which the sex of the subject is often unrecorded12,13. Even in research that involves both sexes, data are often not analysed by sex, and results may therefore not be accurate for either male or female subjects14. Both women and men face disadvantages under these circumstances. Around one-third of osteoporosis-related hip fractures occur in elderly men, but osteoporosis research tends to focus on women, resulting in osteoporosis in men being underdiagnosed, undertreated and underreported15.

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Fig. 1: The global share of women as first authors, last authors and full-group participation in disease-specific medical research.
Fig. 2: Plot of estimated marginal means.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Oertelt-Prigione and the Institute of Gender in Medicine, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, for data acquisition from the GenderMed database. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. History of Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mathias Wullum Nielsen & Londa Schiebinger

  2. Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jens Peter Andersen & Jesper W. Schneider

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  1. Mathias Wullum Nielsen
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  3. Londa Schiebinger
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Contributions

The research was designed by M.W.N. The database was constructed by J.P.A. and M.W.N. The data were analysed by M.W.N., J.W.S. and J.P.A. All authors contributed to writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Mathias Wullum Nielsen.

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Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Figures 1–5, Supplementary Tables 1–14, Supplementary References

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Nielsen, M.W., Andersen, J.P., Schiebinger, L. et al. One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis. Nat Hum Behav 1, 791–796 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0235-x

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