T.E. Washington1, P.C. Obidike1, L.S. Cheng1 1University Of Virginia, Department Of Surgery, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Introduction: Over the past few decades, the number of women in surgery has grown. Women made up 38.3% of first year general surgery residents in 2015, compared to 43.1 % in 2019, and 46.1% in 2021. We sought to evaluate if these gender trends were equally reflected in surgical research. We hypothesized that women may be under-represented in surgical research, particularly as senior authors in basic science.
Methods: We queried all basic/translational or clinical/outcomes abstracts accepted for oral presentations at the Academic Surgical Congress (ASC) from 2015 to 2019. First and senior authors were then queried by name and gender was determined based on pronouns in biographies posted on institution websites, Doximity, and National Provider Identifier (NPI) registries. Abstracts were excluded if two first authors contributed equally or if the gender of the first or senior author could not be determined. Student’s t-test was used to compare groups and a p-value of < 0.05 was considered significant.
Results: We analyzed a total of 1365 abstracts (84.26%) accepted for an oral presentation at ASC from 2015-2019. There were significantly more clinical/outcomes abstracts (225 ± 25) than basic/translational (99 ± 22; p<0.05) per year. There were more women first authors (43.8% ± 4.8%) and women senior authors (19.9% ± 2.9%) of clinical abstracts compared to basic science (36.4% ± 10.0% and 17.3% ± 2.7%, respectively) but these differences were not statistically significant. There were significantly more women first authors than senior authors for both clinical and basic science. Senior authors in basic science on average had completed their terminal doctorate degree earlier than senior authors in clinical/outcomes research (1993 ± 2 vs.1997 ± 1, respectively; p<0.05). Within clinical/outcomes research, there was a significant trend toward gender concordance between first and senior authors (odds ratio of 1.3 ± 0.1 vs. 1.0 ± 0.3 for basic science, p<0.05).
Conclusion: The number of women authors in surgical research has increased over time commiserate with the increased numbers of women trainees in surgery. There was a higher percentage of women authors in clinical research than basic/translational research. Continued awareness of gender trends in our field, especially with attention to mentorship, will insure continued progress toward gender equity in academic surgery.