Medical research often ignores differing health outcomes for men and women

Female lead and last authors more likely to consider disparities related to sex and gender. PDF version Female co-authorship increases the likelihood that a medical-research paper will address gender-related differences in disease or treatment outcomes, a study in Nature Human Behaviour finds (M. W. Nielsen et al. Nature Hum. Behav. 1, 791–796; 2017). Neglecting these disparities — which affect health outcomes in conditions such as cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis — can have life-threatening consequences, the study adds. The authors analysed more than 1.5 million medical-research papers published between 2008 and 2015. They found that the research was most likely to address gender differences when female scientists were first and last authors. However, female researchers comprised only 40% of first authors and 27% of last authors in the papers analysed. This is troubling, the study authors say, because last authors usually lead on identifying, planning and developing research pursuits in health disciplines. Increasing numbers of medical researchers, journal editors and science agencies already acknowledge the importance of including gender analysis in research, the authors note. doi: 10.1038/d41586-017-08993-w Letter One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis Mathias Wullum Nielsen, Jens Peter Andersen, Londa Schiebinger & Jesper W. Schneider Nature Human Behaviour 1, 791–796 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0235-x Download Citation Health occupationsInterdisciplinary studiesSociology Received: 05 May 2017 Accepted: 27 September 2017 Published online: 06 November 2017 Abstract Gender and sex analysis is increasingly recognized as a key factor in creating better medical research and health care1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million medical research papers, our study examined the potential link between women’s participation in medical science and attention to gender-related and sex-related factors in disease-specific research. Adjusting for variations across countries, disease topics and medical research areas, we compared the participation of women authors in studies that do and do not involve gender and sex analysis. Overall, our results show a robust positive correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis. These findings corroborate discussions of how women’s participation in medical science links to research outcomes, and show the mutual benefits of promoting both the scientific advancement of women and the integration of gender and sex analysis into medical research. References 1. Arnold, A. P. Promoting the understanding of sex differences to enhance equity and excellence in biomedical science. Biol. 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Package ‘MCMC-pack’ v.1.3-9 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2017); https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/MCMCpack/MCMCpack.pdf Show context 47. Lenth, R. Package ‘lsmeans’ Version 2.2 (The Comprehensive R Archive Network, 2016); https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lsmeans/lsmeans.pdf Show context Download references Acknowledgements We thank S. Oertelt-Prigione and the Institute of Gender in Medicine, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, for data acquisition from the GenderMed database. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Author information Affiliations History of Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Mathias Wullum Nielsen & Londa Schiebinger Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Jens Peter Andersen & Jesper W. Schneider Contributions The research was designed by M.W.N. The database was constructed by J.P.A. and M.W.N. The data were analysed by M.W.N., J.W.S. and J.P.A. All authors contributed to writing the paper. Corresponding author Correspondence to Mathias Wullum Nielsen. Electronic supplementary material Supplementary Information Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Figures 1–5, Supplementary Tables 1–14, Supplementary References