Abstract

Background
Gender imbalances in academia have been evident historically and persist today. For the past 60 years, we have witnessed the increase of participation of women in biomedical disciplines, showing that the gender gap is shrinking. However, preliminary evidence suggests that women, including female researchers, are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of unequal distribution of childcare, elderly care, and other kinds of domestic and emotional labor. Sudden lockdowns and abrupt shifts in daily routines have had disproportionate consequences on their productivity, which is reflected by a sudden drop in research output in biomedical research, consequently affecting the number of female authors of scientific publications.
Objective
The objective of this study is to test the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate adverse effect on the productivity of female researchers in the biomedical field in terms of authorship of scientific publications.
Methods
This is a retrospective observational bibliometric study. We investigated the proportion of male and female researchers who published scientific papers during the COVID-19 pandemic, using bibliometric data from biomedical preprint servers and selected Springer-Nature journals. We used the ordinary least squares regression model to estimate the expected proportions over time by correcting for temporal trends. We also used a set of statistical methods, such as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and regression discontinuity design, to test the validity of the results.
Results …

Date

April 12, 2021

Authors

Goran Muric, Kristina Lerman, Emilio Ferrara

Journal

Journal of medical Internet research

Volume

23

Issue

4

Pages

e25379

Publisher

JMIR Publications