Gender Inequality in Anesthesiology Research: An Overview of 2018

To the Editor Not much is known about the life of Dorotea Bucca, an Italian woman who lived in 14th century, except that she held her father’s Chair in Medicine and Philosophy for over 30 years at University of Bologna. But she was both an exception and exceptional. We are still far from affirming that, in modern society, there is no gender inequality in scientific field. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization data showed a low percentage (28.8%) of female contribution in research among all fields with the highest percentage in Central Asia (48.1%) and a lower one in South and West Asia (18.5%).1 Until the publication by Miller et al,2 little data were available to assess female contribution to research in anesthesiology. For this reason, we evaluated female authorship in 2018 in anesthesiology journals by inspecting research papers published in the 16 journals with the highest impact factor based on the Journal Citation Report (Table). Five journals were excluded because authors are presented without their full first name, making it impossible to understand the gender of the author. We manually screened all the regular issues of the remaining 11 journals, excluding special issues, looking for all original research papers. We did not consider editorials, reviews, case reports, and letters to the editor. We identified a total number of 1070 papers.Table.: List of the Journals Included at the Beginning of the AnalysisWe analyzed both the percentage of female first authorship and the overall female authorship, considering the first 6 authors for each article. We examined a total of 5561 authors. Importantly, it was not always possible to identify gender of the authors (24 times for first authorship and 133 times for overall authorship) primarily because of unisex names. The percentage of female authorship was surprisingly higher than we expected; 38.69%–40.93% of the articles had first female authorship (n = 414–438), while the overall female authorship was 36.93%–39.33% (n = 2054–2187). These data are concordant with a previous work showing an increase in female first authorship, senior authorship, and editorial board membership in anesthesiology.2 Women have made great strides in our field, but we have not eliminated the gender gap. We have to promote a public and local policy supporting women aiming to avoid gender stereotyping, to support the family as a whole (for example, promoting parental leave for fathers, establishing company creches, and permitting an adequate work-life balance), and to remove occupational segregation. We hope that in the next few years, we will finally be able to celebrate this goal. Our work has some limitations. First, we only considered 16 journals and only the first 6 authors per article, and this may be considered arbitrary. Moreover 5 journals did not have the full name for the authors, just initials, reducing the power of our analysis. Alessandro De Cassai, MDChristelle Correale, MDDepartment of Medicine - DIMEDSection of Anesthesiology and Intensive CareUniversity of PadovaPadova, Italy[email protected]