Raise the Rate of Female Authorship in Arthroplasty Literature

New work from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has explored the trends in female authorship in the arthroplasty research from 2002 to 2019.

Their work, “Trends in Gender Disparities in Authorship of Arthroplasty Research,” was published in the December 2, 2020 edition of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.

The study authors conducted a restrospective review of 12 journals and 14,692 articles which identified the gender of 63,628 authors. The research team found that female involvement in arthroplasty publications increased from 11.1% in 2002 to 12.6% in 2019, and the percentage of female first authors increased from 5.0% in 2002 to 11.3% in 2019.

But…when it came to senior authorship, female authors took a back seat.

The proportion of women who were listed as senior authors declined from 8.5% in 2002 to 6.2% in 2019. The authors wrote, “From our analysis of U.S. publications, on average, women published a mean of 1.9 ± 0.1 publications, while men published 2.9 ± 0.1 publications. The proportion of female senior authors in arthroplasty publications (6.6%) was lower than that of other orthopaedic subspecialties such as sports medicine (9.2%), spine (13.6%), and foot and ankle (13.1%).”

OTW asked co-author, Antonia Chen, Director of Research, Arthroplasty Service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, why the team decided to study arthroplasty in particular.

She said, “We specifically studied arthroplasty since it is an orthopedic subspecialty that has very few women. Previous studies have been done in other orthopedic subspecialties, such as sports and hand, but this study has never been done in arthroplasty. We wanted to understand the authorship trends in a field with few women, to see if the number of published authors in arthroplasty have increased with the greater number of women who are entering the field.”

“It was encouraging to see that more females are publishing in arthroplasty, but it was disheartening to see that the number of senior authors have decreased over time.”

As for why this may be happening, Dr. Chen said, “I suspect that after medical school, residency and fellowship, the desire to publish may decrease, especially for individuals who are not in academic positions. Thus, we are losing a critical voice in orthopedics that can provide different perspectives and a variety of study ideas that improve patient care. Often, individuals are not incentivized to publish, thus as women go further in their careers, they may be less likely to publish in arthroplasty literature.

Rising tide lifts all…female surgeons

OTW then asked Dr. Chen, how she might begin to rectify this situation and she said, “I would begin by incentivizing research. I wouldn’t just incentivize the volume of research, but I would incentivize individuals to conduct research. This could be accomplished by providing more compensated time to conduct research, providing resources to conduct research, and mentoring women in arthroplasty to conduct research. As more senior females conduct research, it is likely that they will be role models to encourage other females to also conduct arthroplasty research. Thus, by incentivizing one group, it can bring up the entire group to performing more arthroplasty research and providing more balanced representation in the arthroplasty research field.”