Gender Participation by Sport in Published Sports and Exercise Medicine Original Research

Prior research has shown that there are fewer women than men participants in sports and exercise medicine research.

To determine how participation in sports and exercise medicine research has changed and compares between women and men, overall and by sport of participants.

Meta-analysis; Level of evidence, 4.

The authors identified original research articles published in 2020 in 3 influential sports and exercise medicine journals (British Journal of Sports Medicine, American Journal of Sports Medicine, and Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise). Articles were analyzed as a group overall and within subsets distinguishing sport-specific articles. For the complete set and each subset, the pooled proportions of participants by gender and the mean percentage of women participants per article were calculated.

A total of 579 articles were included in the analysis. There were 1,693,304 participants pooled across all articles, of whom 54.4% were men and 45.6% were women. There was a mean of 37% women participants per article. Among all articles that included athletes of a single sport, 80% of the pooled participants were men and 20% were women, with a mean of 19.6% women participants per article.

There were fewer women than men participants in this sample overall and especially in sport-specific articles.