Why are female researchers missing out on Covid-19 research?
Well, Pinho-Gomes A, Peters S, Thompson K, et al., investigated gender differences in authorship of Covid-19 research since the onset of the pandemic and their findings established an under-representation.
That women account for about a third of all authors who published papers related to Covid-19 since the beginning of the outbreak in January 2020, says the ‘Where are the women? Gender inequalities in Covid-19 research authorship (2020)’ published in BMJ Global Health journal.
The researchers identified 1,445 papers related to Covid-19, of which 1,370 were included in the overall analysis, with a total of 6,722 authors. Overall, women represented 34 per cent of all authors, irrespective of the positions- first or last author.
They say under-representation of female researchers tends to create under-representation of issues that are relevant to women in research. As a result, present a likelihood of shallow understanding of Covid-19 owing to gaps created due to little participation of women.
“Gender biases seem to be affecting Covid-19 research similar to other scientific areas, highlighting that women are consistently being under-represented,” they state in the study. “This may have implications for the availability and interrogation of sex-disaggregated data and therefore, our understanding of Covid-19.”
Gender biases
They allude to under-representation of women in leadership, the high impact of Covid-19 and time poverty as among the reasons why gender biases are permeating in research related to Covid-19.
“Covid-19 research may be shaped by those in leadership positions, who remain more often men,” they argue.
“(It is also), a high-profile and dynamic topic where women may either be overtly or covertly denied access to Covid-19 research, because of its anticipated high impact…(and) women may have less time to commit to research during the pandemic..”
Further, gender biases during the peer-review process and the reality that relatively large amount of the early Covid-19 publications are commissioned articles, which are, in general, more likely to be published by men, compound the reasons why women are few in the discourse, they argue.
“There is a pressing need to reduce these gender inequalities because women’s participation in research is associated with a higher likelihood of reporting gender and sex-disaggregated data, which in turn improve our understanding of the clinical and epidemiological dimensions of Covid-19,” they recommend.
They say, promoting voluntary disclosure of gender as part of the submission process would also result to overcoming persistently low representation of women in authorship of Covid-19 papers and scientific papers in general.
“This would allow editorial teams to monitor gender inequalities in authorship and it would encourage research teams to foster equality in authorship,” the researchers note.
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