Contribution of women authors in French medical journals from 1983 to 2019

Despite the feminization of the medical profession, the academic world remains largely male-dominated. Several studies conducted in the English-speaking world have shown that women are published less than men. Our goal is to define the evolution of the role of women in five French medical journals.

The articles from five French journals (Revue du Praticien, Bulletin du Cancer, Exercer, Presse Médicale, Cancer/Radiothérapie) published in February between 1983 and 2019 were included. We selected twelve years from that period of time. The analysis was completed using Cochran-Armitage tests with a significance level of<0,05. Among the authors, 4397 were included in total and we were able to determine the gender of 4309 of them.

The percentage of female authors went from 16% in 1983 to 36.4% in 2019 (p<0.001). This rise is more significant for those specializing in surgery than for those specializing in medicine, with a percentage going from 14% to 38.5% (p<0.001) against 16.8% to 35.4% (p<0.001) respectively. In 2019, women still only represent 30.2% of the last authors, 27.6% of editorial authors and 30.6% of corresponding authors.

Our study underlines a significant increase in the number of female authors and highlights that their position as authors remains on the margins of the most prestigious authorial positions. While we can celebrate this increase, we nevertheless notice that there are fewer female authors than female practitioners.