Gender Authorship in Accepted AAN Abstracts During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Objective: We aimed to analyze gender authorship of accepted AAN s in the year prior to and during the pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to deleterious effects on productivity of female scientists. The AAN changed the review guidelines to blind reviewers to author names and affiliations in 2021. We analyzed the trends of gender authorship over two years given the pandemic and blinding. Design/Methods: s were reviewed manually (n=3211 in 2020;n=2188 in 2021). Data were collected regarding gender of first and senior authors, types of research (case report, series, or trial), subspecialty, and origin of research (USA, international, or corporate-affiliated). We compared the percentages of female first and senior authors in the two years using Z-test for two independent proportions. Results: The percentages of female first and senior authors did not significantly change from the 2020 to 2021 AAN meetings. The analysis of subspecialties with more than 100 s showed the lowest percentages of female senior authors were cerebrovascular disease (29%) and headache (29%) in 2020. Cerebrovascular disease continued to have the lowest percentage (29%) in 2021. For case reports and case series, the percentages of female first and senior authors were 51%, 37% in 2020 and 52%, 36% in 2021. For clinical trials, the percentages were 33%, 25% in 2020 and 28%, 20% in 2021. In analysis of the origin of research, corporate-affiliated had the lowest percentages of female first (34%, 36%) and senior authors (23%, 30%). Conclusions: Our study did not show significant changes of female authorship in accepted AAN s during the pandemic. This may be due to positive changes instituted by the AAN such as increasing awareness of disparity, blinding of s, and increased female leadership. Nevertheless, clinical trials and corporate-affiliated research still had significantly low proportions of female authors.