Trends in women's authorship in pharmacy literature

The purpose of this evaluation was to determine whether the percentage of women as first authors in pharmacy journals has continued to increase over the past decade.

Key pharmacy practice journals were identified from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Core List of Journals for Pharmacy Education. Articles were analyzed from January 2007 through December 2017. The outcome of interest was the proportion of articles having feminine names as the first author. Femininity was determined for first authors by matching the first name to data from the U.S. Social Security Administration or genderize.io. The Cochran-Armitage trend test was used to determine differences in proportion of women as first authors over time.

The listed first authors over the past decade were 52.7% female for all studied journals from 2007 through 2017. All but 1 journal demonstrated a significant increase in the proportion of female first authors over the time period studied. Subanalyses of journals (1) containing more than 90% gender-identifiable articles, (2) focused predominantly on contemporary drug therapy or pharmacy practice and not typically including pharmaceutical- or pharmacokinetics-related topics, and (3) that did not focus predominantly on contemporary therapy or practice and included pharmaceutical- or pharmacokinetics-related topics were each significant.

Female first authorship in pharmacy practice journals appears to have increased in the past decade but may potentially be reaching a plateau. The proportion of female first authorship is close to reaching that of women in the U.S. pharmacy workforce when compared over the same time period.