Gender disparity in authorships of manuscripts on the COVID-19 outbreak

In a recent manuscript regarding the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wenham et al. (2020) called the governments and global health institutions of different countries to take some important actions. First, as specified by these authors, the governments and global health institutions should consider the sex and gender effects of the COVID-19 outbreak (Wenham et al. 2020). Second, the governments and global health institutions should also conduct an analysis of the gendered impacts of the multiple outbreaks (Wenham et al. 2020). Lastly, they should incorporate the voices of women on the front line of the response to COVID-19 (Wenham et al. 2020). Over the last four months, many different types of manuscripts regarding specific aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak have been published in PubMed and a lot of journals have called works regarding this issue with “fast track decision”. Given that, in science, gender disparity is an important and recognized issue (Schwalbe and Fearon 2018; Mathad et al. 2019; Shannon et al. 2019) (for instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Women in Science data has recently demonstrated that ~30% of the world’s researchers were women in 2018 [Mathad et al. 2019]), we have assessed the percentages of female first and last authors among all manuscripts on the COVID-19 outbreak available so far. Searching in PubMed (which has a specific section on COVID-19) from January 1st, 2020 to March 24th, 2020, we obtained 1448 items (namely, manuscripts). We extracted information on the names of the first and last authors in order to find if they were men or women (by photos, information on ResearchGate or other websites), as well as information on journals. Of the initial 1448 items, we excluded 312, as we were unable to obtain the gender of the first and/or last authors exactly. Hence, after this selection, the number of items included in the final statistical analysis was 1136. Table 1 summarizes the percentage of female researchers among the first and last authors in all manuscripts on COVID-19 published up till March 24th, 2020. As reported, we found that 26.5% (95% confidence interval 23.9–29.2%) of first authors were female researchers and 25.3% (95% confidence interval 22.3–28.4%) of last authors were women. No significant difference was observed when we stratified the manuscripts by journal rank (namely, impact factor < 10 vs. impact factor ≥ 10) or journal country. …