2 research outputs found
Women in contemporary cancer research
Despite recent advances, gender inequality persists in many scientific fields,
including medicine. Thus far, no study has extensively analyzed the gender
composition of contemporary researchers in the oncology field. We examined 40
oncological journals (Web of Science, ONCOLOGY category) with different impact
factors (Q1-Q4) and extracted all the articles and reviews published during 2015
17, in order to identify the gender of their authors. Our data showed that women
represent about 38% of all the authorships, both in articles and reviews. In relative
terms, women are overrepresented as first authors of articles (43.8%), and clearly
underrepresented as last or senior authors (<30%). This double pattern, also
observed in other medical fields, suggests that age, or more specifically, seniority,
may play some role in the gender composition of cancer researchers. Examining
the pattern of collaboration, an interesting finding was observed: the articles
signed by a woman in the first or in the last position roughly showed gender parity
in the byline. We found also some differences in the content of the articles
depending on which gender occupies the first and last positions of the authorships