727 Trends Between Males and Females in Public and Private Neurosurgical Research Funding From 2015 to 2021

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Open Payments Database (OPD) is a public database established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the 2010 Physician Payments Sunshine Act. It is a national program that reports all financial relationships between physicians and healthcare manufacturers, including pharmaceutical and medical device companies. OPD aims to promote transparency and help patients make informed decisions about their healthcare providers. METHODS: All the Principal Investigators from 2015 to 2021 who received research payments as neurosurgeons or payments tagged with the keyword "neurosurgery" in the OPD and NIH RePORTER, respectively, were subclassified according to the neurosurgical subspecialty of their research and their identified gender; Python and R were used to compute descriptive statistics for the public and private research payments. RESULTS: The total difference between males and females in public and private neurosurgical research funding from 2015 to 2021 was $674,715,146.00 and $148,361,648.45, respectively. The difference in funding has a growth rate of 54.63% and 32.33% from 2015–2021 in private and public funding, respectively. The Permutation Test showed a significant difference in total private funding between males and females in 2018 (p = 0.03). Besides this, there were no significant differences between gender payments in the public and private sectors. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest a significant difference in total funding for neurosurgery, with males receiving significantly more public and private funding than females. The difference in funding has also grown over time, particularly in private funding. However, the difference in funding per researcher between the two groups is similar; the discrepancy between funding is largely due to gender disparity in the number of neurosurgical researchers.