Female authorship in emergency medicine parallels women practicing academic emergency medicine

Background: Studies have shown that women in emergency medicine (EM) lag behind their male counterparts in academic productivity.

Objectives: We compared the proportion of female attending physicians from EM academic programs to the proportion of female first or second authors of original scientific manuscripts and case reports from four major EM journals in a single year.

Methods: We used a retrospective cross-sectional design. Original scientific manuscripts and case reports from four major EM journals published in 2005: Academic Emergency Medicine, Annals of Emergency Medicine, American Journal of Emergency Medicine, and Journal of Emergency Medicine were reviewed to determine genders of first and second authors. The proportion of female first or second authorship was then compared to the proportion of female EM attending physicians from 134 academic EM programs in the United States. Data were analyzed using Pearson's chi-squared and Clopper-Pearson binomial confidence intervals as appropriate. A p-value of ≤ 0.05 was considered significant.

Results: The percentage of female faculty; 940/3571 (26.32%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 24.9-27.8%) vs. the percentage of female first or second authorship 289/1123 (25.73%, 95% CI 23.3-28.4%) was not statistically significant (p = 0.562). There was no difference in the proportion of male and female authors with multiple manuscripts (p = 0.889).

Conclusions: As measured by first and second authorship, there was no discrepancy between the proportion of female EM faculty and the proportion of female authorship in EM literature from 2005.