You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Gender equality in palliative medicine editorial boards, authorships and national societies
  1. Michael Haidinger1,
  2. Patrick Wechsler2,
  3. Svenja Ravioli3,
  4. Aristomenis Exadaktylos4 and
  5. Gregor Lindner4,5
  1. 1 Department of Internal Medicine, Bülach Hospital, Bülach, Switzerland
  2. 2 Department of Internal and Emergency Medicine, Bürgerspital Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland
  3. 3 Department of Emergency Medicine, King's College London, London, UK
  4. 4 Department of Emergency Medicine, Inselspital Universitatsspital Bern, Bern, Switzerland
  5. 5 Department of Emergency Medicine, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Linz, Austria
  1. Correspondence to Dr Michael Haidinger, Department of Internal Medicine, Bülach Hospital, Bülach, Zurich, Switzerland; haidinger{at}hin.ch

https://doi.org/10.1136/spcare-2023-004293

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Introduction

    Women are under-represented throughout the medical academic world: There is a significant gender gap in editorial boards and authorships of scientific medical journals, in boards of medical societies, and as speakers and award winners at medical conferences.1–3 Why is this a problem? Not only is it a question of equality and fairness at the workplace, but also relevant for patient care and team performance: Women internists were found to have lower mortality and readmission rates compared with their men colleagues.4 Additionally, gender diversity proved to be an important factor for the development, process and outcomes of scientific teams. Evidence on gender distribution in editorial boards and authorships of academic palliative care journals and in palliative care societies are scarce. In cancer palliative care, gender distribution was found to be more balanced with 50% of women first and 39% last authors.5 However, the number of women physicians was only 14% in first and 8% in last authors indicating more diverse, interprofessional research teams.5 In palliative care, working in interprofessional teams is common. Accordingly, different and more diverse professional groups …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors MH and GL planned the study and conducted the study design. MH, SR and GL were involved in data collection, statistical analysis and performed the manuscript draft (original draft). PW was involved in data collection and statistical analysis. AE was involved in data analyses. All authors critically revised the manuscript draft writing (review and editing).

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.