Gender bias in authorship in the Anatomical Record and Anatomical Sciences Education journals.

Abstract

There has been a clear difference in gender representation in scientific publishing with males publishing more papers than females across the scientific and clinical disciplines. Moreover this gender bias appears to start early on during training, with male PhD students being more likely than females to be listed as authors on journal articles. Given the importance of publications in job acquisition, promotion, and tenure, the academic career of females appears to be at a disadvantage compared to their male counterparts. Although much work has been done on the gender bias in science, gender bias in authorship in the anatomical sciences has not yet been investigated.We sought to determine if there was a gender bias in authorship in the anatomical sciences by looking at the gender of authors in Anatomical Sciences Education (ASE) and the Anatomical Record (AR). Gender of each author was presumed based on author's first name and/or determined based on various social media accounts (e.g., LinkedIn, ResearchGate, and Facebook) or departmental webpages. Those authors whose genders could not be discerned based on the above methods were excluded from analyses. Gender was determined for first, senior, and middle (i.e., second, third, etc.) authorship in all journal articles from the ten volumes in AR and ASE spanning from 2008–2017. Results were tabulated and a chi‐square test of independence was conducted to determine if there was gender bias authorship position in these journals.Within ASE, males had more first (227/409; 55.5%), senior (248/372; 66.7%), and middle authorships (477/780; 61.2%) than females. Males also had more first (839/1460; 57.5%) senior (946/1326; 71.3%) and middle authorships (2110/3256; 64.8%) compared to females in AR. Chi‐square analyses demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between gender and the level of authorship (first, middle, and senior) in ASE [x2 (2, n = 1561) =10.226, p = 0.006, Cohen's w= 0.081] and AR [x2 (2, n = 6042) =58.765, p < 0.001, Cohen's w = 0.099].These results indicate that like the other basic and clinical science a gender bias in publishing exists in the anatomical sciences. Whether this bias is driven by authorship (i.e., more males publish than females), editorial decisions, or other factors is unclear. However, this data can and should be used by anatomists as we try to mitigate gender bias in our discipline.Support or Funding InformationNoneThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.