In the first half of 2020, of the three million submissions to major health and medical journals only 36 percent were from women
The Covid-19 pandemic was a windfall for male health researchers but a bane for their female counterparts. In the first half of 2020, of the three million submissions to major health and medical journals, only 36 percent were from women.
This gender gap was evident across all authorship positions and article types, in both top-tier and lower-impact journals. The disparity was particularly pronounced among younger female authors who were just starting their careers.
“The publishing game during the pandemic was far from a level playing field”, notes the article “How pandemic publishing struck a blow to the visibility of women’s expertise” published by the British Medical Journal.
Written by Jocalyn Clark, an international editor at The BMJ who was previously executive editor at the Lancet during the pandemic, the article cites the example of the submissions to The BMJ during the period.
“The BMJ recorded a notable reduction in articles from women among nine specialist journals and two large general medical journals it publishes: just 22.9% of the corresponding authors of COVID-19 research manuscripts submitted from January to May 2020 were women, down from 38.9% of pre-pandemic submissions,” Clark reveals.
“Amid the massive, rapid publication of COVID papers, the harm to women’s research productivity was immediate, especially those early in their careers,” she adds.
And when compared with 2019, women’s publication output in 2020 shows a drop of 15 percent, and relative to men, it amounts to a 24 percent lower output.
Analysis of almost half a million authors across basic medicine, biology, chemistry, and clinical medicine confirmed a widening gender gap, showing that the early disadvantage to women’s recognition and careers was real and durable.
According to the Dimensions database of scientific research, up to December 31, 2022, among the top academic authors by volume since the beginning of the pandemic, nine of the ten at the Lancet and The BMJ were men, as were seven of the ten at the New England Journal of Medicine. Only the Journal of the American Medical Association had more women than men among its ten most prolific academic authors.
“When men were benefiting from COVID opportunities, women were shouldering the domestic burden imposed on them,” Clark points out. “This was particularly brutal if they had small children and during early lockdowns, when schools and daycare centres closed and researchers were working from home.”
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