How does vascular surgery compare to other specialties in the growth of gender diversity in published research? “Are we leaders in the field, or are we trailing?”
Those were questions posed by Monica Majumdar, MD, a general surgery resident at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, during the Eastern Vascular Society (EVS) annual meeting in Philadelphia (Sept. 29–Oct. 1) as she presented new data on the topic.
“In the Journal of Vascular Surgery [JVS] there was a statistically evident linear increase in female-first authorship over time at only 5.3% in 2010 compared to 20% in 2020. And while there appeared to be some gains in the percentage of last authorship and overall proportion of female authors, these trends were not linear or significant over the 10-year study period,” she said.
When compared to ophthalmology and neurosurgery, the trend showing “an encouraging increase in the academic footprint of female-driven research” in vascular surgery “is significantly greater.”
