Abstract
BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic increased the gender gap in academic publishing. This study assesses COVID-19’s impact on ophthalmology gender authorship distribution and compares the gender authorship proportion of COVID-19 ophthalmology-related articles to previous ophthalmology articles.MethodsThis cohort study includes authors listed in all publications related to ophthalmology in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and CDC COVID-19 research database. Articles from 65 ophthalmology journals from January to July 2020 were selected. All previous articles published in the same journals were extracted from PubMed. Gender-API determined authors’ gender.ResultsOut of 119,457 COVID-19-related articles, we analyzed 528 ophthalmology-related articles written by 2518 authors. Women did not exceed 40% in any authorship positions and were most likely to be middle, first, and finally, last authors. The proportions of women in all authorship positions from the 2020 COVID-19 group (29.6% first, 31.5% middle, 22.1% last) are significantly lower compared to the predicted 2020 data points (37.4% first, 37.0% middle, 27.6% last) (p < .01). The gap between the proportion of female authors in COVID-19 ophthalmology research and the 2020 ophthalmology-predicted proportion (based on 2002–2019 data) is 6.1% for overall authors, 7.8% for first authors, and 5.5% for last and middle authors. The 2020 COVID-19 authorship group (1925 authors) was also compared to the 2019 group (33,049 authors) based on journal category (clinical/basic science research, general/subspecialty ophthalmology, journal impact factor).ConclusionsCOVID-19 amplified the authorship gender gap in ophthalmology. When compared to previous years, there was a greater decrease in women’s than men’s academic productivity.
Highlights
Material and methodsClinical and basic research leadership benefit from diversity and inclusion [1, 2]
According to recent gender distribution studies in ophthalmology authorship using data from 2002 to 2018, the proportion of female authors has increased more slowly in subspecialty journals compared to general ophthalmology journals and fewer women occupy senior authorship positions [5, 6]
For authors with undetermined gender, we identified them by their full name and affiliated institution on professional websites and determined their gender based on their picture and descriptive paragraphs referring to them using a gender-specific pronoun
Summary
Material and methodsClinical and basic research leadership benefit from diversity and inclusion [1, 2]. With women increasingly contributing to medical and research fields, positive trends for women in ophthalmology have been highlighted during the past decade: increasing numbers of female ophthalmology residents, higher proportions of female speakers at ophthalmology conferences, and a significant increase in women ophthalmology authors [3, 4]. Despite this progress, female underrepresentation in academic ophthalmology remains a challenge, as women’s contribution to ophthalmology authorship is well under the 50% mark. This study assesses COVID-19’s impact on ophthalmology gender authorship distribution and compares the gender authorship proportion of COVID-19 ophthalmology-related articles to previous ophthalmology articles
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