A. Marrone1, L. Berman2, D. Rothstein1 1State University Of New York At Buffalo,Department Of Surgery,Buffalo, NY, USA 2Nemours/Alfred I DuPont Hospital for Children,Department Of Surgery,Wilmington, DE, USA
Introduction:
Multiple studies have found gender disparities in representation of women physicians in scientific authorship. Although the proportion of women graduating from pediatric surgery training programs appears to be increasing, we hypothesized that gender disparities remain in female representation in first or senior authorship of publications in a leading pediatric surgery journal.
Methods: Tables of contents for the Journal of Pediatric Surgery (JPS) in the years 2007, 2012, and 2017 were examined. We quantified the prevalence of female first and last authorship of original research articles, case reports, reviews, and lectures that came from United States or Canadian institutions. Author gender was assigned by either typical name recognition or internet searches. The same methods were used for names of members of the American Pediatric Surgical Association (APSA) from the years 2012 and 2017 (2007 data not available). Lastly, we determined the proportion of female members among all surgeons granted pediatric surgery specialty certificates by the American Board of Surgery (ABS).
Results: Of the 1338 JPS articles reviewed, 24 (1.8%) were excluded due to inability to identify gender of either author. In the years 2007, 2012, and 2017 the percentages of female first authors were 32.3%, 34.1%, and 53.8% respectively. The percentage of female senior authors were 15.7%, 23.0%, and 26.0%, respectively. The percentage of female members of APSA in 2012 and 2017 were 20.5% and 23.8%, respectively. Among the 1153 surgeons with ABS pediatric surgery certificates, 276 (23.9%) are women.
Conclusion: Female representation in academic pediatric surgical authorship is increasing, particularly among first authors. Although a relatively small proportion of senior authors are women, this proportion is concordant with society membership gender distributions.
