(026) Ten Years of Authorship by Women in Sexual Medicine Journals: Are We Making Progress?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction Women are historically underrepresented in Urology, but the demographics are slowly changing. As of 2023, only 10.9% of urology attendings are women; however, women represent 37% of the accepted residency class of 2028. With increasing representation of women in urology, we hypothesized this would reflect in women’s authorship patterns in published manuscripts. Objective We sought to identify if the increasing representation of women in urology is reflected in first or last authorship in sexual medicine journals. Methods All manuscripts published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and Sexual Medicine from 2013 to 2023 were reviewed. Original research manuscripts were included; manuscripts submitted under Psychology subsections, Paraphilia subsections, as well as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, communications, commentaries, replies, and those involving psychometrics were excluded. Single author manuscripts were classified under first author for the analysis. First and last authors were identified and internet search was performed to best determine gender, relying on, in order of preference: listed pronouns, picture, or traditionally masculine versus feminine name. We recognize this method of determining gender identity based on conventional gender presentations is imperfect and may not represent the full spectrum of gender diversity of the included authors. Institutional information was also collected. Chi-square analyses and odds ratio were performed to compare authorship patterns. Results 2156 manuscripts met criteria, 1717 from Journal of Sexual Medicine and 439 from Sexual Medicine. From 2013-2023, women composed 44.1% (951/2156) of first authors and 32.5% (691/2156) of last authors. Overall, first authorship by women increased from 2013 (110/271, 41%) to 2023 (59/104, 57%) (p<0.005) [Figure 1]. In 2022 and 2023, women were the majority of first authors (50.3% and 56.7%, respectively). Manuscripts with women as first authors were more likely to have women as last authors (OR: 1.64, CI: 1.45-1.86, p<0.0001). In the US and Canada, the majority of first (61.1%, 214/350) and last (61.6%, 157/254) authors who are women came from public rather than private institutions, but this was non-significant. First authors who are women predominantly came from North America (38.6%), Europe (36.3%), Asia (17.7%), South America (3.9%), Australia/New Zealand (2.6%), followed by Africa (0.9%); last authors who are women had a similar breakdown by continent. The greatest percentage of authorship by women came from Australia/New Zealand with 50.8% (32/63) of first authors and 45% (27/60) of last authors. The largest disparity was seen in Africa with 22.2% (10/45) of first authors and a mere 16.3% (7/43) of last authors being women. Conclusions Authorship by women in sexual medicine journals is increasing over time, with positive trends observed in both first and last authorship. The effect is more pronounced in first authorship as compared to last, possibly reflecting the increasing numbers of trainees who are women. Manuscripts with women as first authors are correlated with last authors who are women, supporting a positive relationship in gender concordant mentorship. Disclosure No.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.048 | 0.143 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".