Gender Differences in First Authors, Peer Reviewers, and Grand Rounds Presenters in Medicine

Women are underrepresented in senior academic positions that depend on accomplishments like presentations and publications, and gender bias has shown to be a factor. We studied whether gender differences existed in multiple internal medicine venues: first authorship in a national trainee poster competition; first authorship in a national specialty-specific poster competition; peer reviewer-ship in three prestigious medical journals; and in presentations at UNM grand rounds. We found some progress in gender parity overall, but not yet enough. We first studied gender differences in authorship among residents in a 2015 national internal medicine resident poster competition; we found more authors were male than female (p=0.0000). We next second studied gender differences in first authorship for a 2017 trainee and attending physician scholarly competition, and found more male than female first authors in absolute numbers but the difference was not statistically significant (p=0.1225). Thirdly, we studied gender differences in peer reviewers for the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016. Female peer reviewers in all years and journals were less than the population proportion of female physicians except in JAMA 2006 (JAMA: p=0.410, p=0.005, p=0.000, p=0.000, respectively; NEJM: p=0.000 each year; Annals: p=0.000 each year). Lastly, we studied gender differences in UNM internal medicine grand rounds speakers and found increasing numbers of female presenters over 4.5 years, but the percent of female presenters was significantly lower than male presenters for all years except 2018 (p=0.000). Journal editors and conference organizers should be explicitly encouraged to invite female scientists, and women should be encouraged to embrace these opportunities. Having more female peer reviewers, authors, and presenters may expand an untapped well of knowledge, promote more scholarship from female scientists, and promote academic advancement for women