WOMEN IN GASTROENTEROLOGY: SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

ABSTRACT

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted medical personnel and scientists in numerous ways. Many providers in academic medicine experienced increases in both clinical and domestic responsibilities, and it is not known if the COVID-19 pandemic impacted both genders equally. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, women published fewer papers in the first or senior authorship position in gastroenterology (GI) and hepatology journals compared to men. We hypothesized that the COVID-19 pandemic may have impacted the research productivity of women and men publishing in GI and hepatology journals differently. Methods: We reviewed four select GI and hepatology journals, namely the American Journal of Gastroenterology (AJG), Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (CGH), Gastroenterology, and Hepatology from May 2020 to April 2021, and extracted the authors of COVID-related publications within this period. We separately considered authors in the first-author position, authors in the senior (last) author position, and authors in any position. Gender was determined using Genderize.io, an online database that predicts gender with high reproducibility. As a reference group, we extracted all authors from Hepatology and AJG from January to June 2019 (pre-pandemic). We used the chi-square test to measure the difference in proportions of women authors (first-author, senior-author, any-author position) of COVID-related papers compared to reference publications in 2019. Results: We identified 2,184 authors of COVID-related publications and 3,533 authors of non- COVID papers (2019 reference group) after excluding 10 authors where the gender could not be determined. Genderize.io was able to identify the gender of 84.4% of authors with high certainty (probability of ≥0.8). Overall, we observed no differences in the gender of authors between COVID-related papers and the reference group. Women comprised 30.5% of authors of COVID-related papers, compared to 31.4% of authors in the reference group (p=0.6). Women comprised 31.9% of first authors of COVID-related papers compared to 32.4% of first-authors in the reference group (p=0.9) and 21.2% of senior authors of COVIDrelated papers compared to 21.2% of senior authors in the reference group (p=1.0). The proportion of women authors of COVID-related papers, by position, for each journal is shown in the Figure. Conclusion: While gender gaps exist among authors of GI and hepatology publications, we did not observe gender differences in research productivity, as measured by published papers of COVID-19 related papers compared to work published the year prior, for authors publishing in select GI and hepatology journals. Additional studies are needed to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the future professional careers and academic advancements of women in gastroenterology and early-stage career scientists.