Gender Distribution of Scholarly Productivity in Pediatric Hospital Medicine

Background: Background
Gender disparities in academic medicine are well-described with a gender gap in authorship and invited speakers. As a newly established subspecialty of pediatrics, gender distribution of scholarly productivity in the field of Pediatric Hospital Medicine (PHM) has not been examined.

Our primary aim was to assess the gender distribution of authorship for published PHM scholarly work and speaking opportunities at national conferences with PHM content and to compare it to the gender distribution of the field at large for the five-year period 2015-2019. Our secondary aim was to assess correlation between the gender distribution of planning committees and editorial boards and the gender distribution of the respective authors/speakers.

Methods: Data was obtained from public records and gender was determined based on first name, internet profile searches for gendered pronouns or photos of subjects. The distribution of the field of PHM was taken from self-reported gender of the membership of AAP Section on Hospital Medicine for the same time frame and cross-checked with published sources. Differences between observed proportions of women authors/presenters and proportion of women in the field were evaluated using a two-proportion z-test. Correlation was assessed by Pearson’s correlation coefficient.

Results: For the time period 2015 – 2019, the gender distribution of PHM was determined to be 69% women (95% CI 68-71%). We evaluated 570 original science manuscripts published in Hospital Pediatrics or Journal of Hospital Medicine (pediatric content only) and found 67% (95% CI 63-71%) women first authors (comparison with population, p=>0.05); 49% women senior authors (95% CI 44-53%) (comparison with population, p= <0.001). For speaking opportunities at national conferences with dedicated PHM content, we evaluated 1093 presentations and found presenters of submitted content were 69% women (95% CI 65-72%) (comparison with population, p=>0.05); invited content 44% women (95% CI 37-51%) (comparison with population, p=>0.05). Figure 1 presents the gender distribution of authorship and speaking opportunities. Figure 2 presents the planning committee gender distribution plotted against presenter gender distribution. There was a strong positive correlation between these values (r=0.94).

Conclusion: Women were proportionally represented as junior authors and presenters of submitted content but underrepresented as senior authors or invited speakers in PHM. The strong correlation between gender distribution of planning committees and their respective presenters suggests actionable next steps toward gender equity include representativeness as a goal for the composition of these groups. Further study is needed to understand barriers to adequate representation for women as invited speakers and senior authors.