The Gender Gap in Surgical Literature: Are We Making Progress?

The percentage of women in surgical leadership roles is not commensurate with percent of women in field of surgery. Citation indexes are used as proxy for scholarly impact and may serve as an indicator of women's progress in academic surgery. We aimed to evaluate gender disparities in authorship of surgery manuscripts in high-impact journals.

In this bibliometric analysis of original research articles from four high-impact surgical journals from 2008 to 2010 (period A) and 2018-2020 (period B), the gender of primary and senior authors was assigned by Genderize.io. Number of citations per article was identified via Web of Science. Number of citations by gender of authors was compared across time periods.

Of the 3575 articles (Period A = 1915; Period B = 1660), 962 (26.9%) had women as primary authors and 590 (17.2%) as senior authors. Over time, significant increases in women primary and senior authorship were noted from 22.8% to 31.7% (P < 0.001) and 13.9% (254/11,915) to 21% (336/1660), respectively (P < 0.001). Articles written with women primary authors had fewer median (interquartile range) citations than those by men as primary author in period A (39 [17-69.5] versus 42 [20.0-84.0]; P = 0.005). Gender parity was noted in period B (9 [4-19] versus 9 [4-20] citations; P = 0.307). In period A, articles written by women as both primary and senior authors had approximately 25% fewer median citations compared with those by men (34 [17-62] versus 44 [21-86]); P < 0.011), and this reached parity in period B (9 [4-20] versus 9 [4-21]); P < 0.658).

Overall, gender authorship and citations parity are improving in high-impact surgery journals.