School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, Australia.
Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, Australia; Davies Livestock Research Centre, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia; Institute for Photonics & Advanced Sensing, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia; Robinson Research Institute, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia.
Soc Sci Med. 2023 Mar;320:115761. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115761. Epub 2023 Feb 3.
The SARS-CoV2 pandemic led to drastic social restrictions globally. Early data suggest that women in science have been more adversely affected by these lockdowns than men, with relatively fewer scientific articles authored by women. However, these observations test broad populations with many potential causes of disparity. Australia presents a natural experimental condition where several states of similar demographics and disease impact had differing approaches in their social isolation strategies. The state of Victoria experienced 280 days of lockdowns from 2020 to 2021, whereas the comparable state of New South Wales experienced 107 days, most of these in 2021, and other states even fewer restrictions.
To assess how the gender balance changed in Australian biomedical publishing with the lockdowns, we created a custom workflow to analyse PubMed data from more than 120,000 published articles submitted in 2019-2021 from Australian authors.
Broadly, Australian women have been incredibly resilient to the challenges faced by the lockdowns. There was an increase in the number of published articles submitted in 2020 that was equally due to women as men, including from Victoria. On the other hand, articles specifically addressing COVID-19 were significantly less likely to be authored by women than those on other topics, a finding not likely due to particular gender imbalance in virology or viral epidemiology, since publications on HIV followed similar patterns to previous years. By 2021, this imbalance had reversed, with more COVID-19-related papers authored by women than men.
These data suggest women from Victoria were less able to rapidly transition to new research early in the pandemic but had accommodated to the new conditions by 2021. This work indicates we need strategies to support women in science as the pandemic continues and to continue to monitor the situation for its impact on vulnerable groups.
SARS-CoV2 大流行在全球范围内导致了严格的社会限制。早期数据表明，与男性相比，科学界的女性受到这些封锁的影响更为严重，女性撰写的科学论文相对较少。然而，这些观察结果检验了具有许多潜在差异原因的广泛人群。澳大利亚提供了一种自然的实验条件，即几个人口统计学和疾病影响相似的州在其社会隔离策略上采取了不同的方法。维多利亚州在 2020 年至 2021 年期间经历了 280 天的封锁，而可比的新南威尔士州经历了 107 天的封锁，其中大部分是在 2021 年，其他州的限制甚至更少。
为了评估封锁对澳大利亚生物医学出版界性别平衡的影响，我们创建了一个自定义工作流程，以分析来自澳大利亚作者在 2019-2021 年期间提交的超过 120,000 篇已发表文章的 PubMed 数据。
总的来说，澳大利亚女性对封锁带来的挑战具有极强的适应能力。2020 年提交的已发表文章数量有所增加，这同样归功于男性和女性，包括来自维多利亚州的作者。另一方面，专门针对 COVID-19 的文章明显比其他主题的文章更不可能由女性撰写，这一发现不太可能归因于病毒学或病毒流行病学中的特定性别失衡，因为 HIV 相关出版物遵循与往年相似的模式。到 2021 年，这种不平衡已经逆转，女性撰写的与 COVID-19 相关的论文多于男性。
这些数据表明，维多利亚州的女性在大流行早期无法迅速转向新的研究，但到 2021 年已适应了新的环境。这项工作表明，随着大流行的继续，我们需要制定支持科学界女性的战略，并继续监测其对弱势群体的影响。
