Abstract
Every paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine from 1980 to 2024 (n=5,176) was reviewed to quantify female and male research participants and authors.
Female individuals accounted for 23% of participants. One contributor to this under-representation
is that the number of studies that include male participants is 3,847 versus 1,826
studies with female participants. Also, 417 studies included only female participants
versus 2,436 studies including only male participants. Furthermore, female authors
accounted for 18% of the total authors over the history of the International Journal of Sports Medicine (1,947 female and 8,698 male authors). There were also 859 papers with female first/last
authors versus 1,212 papers with male first/last authors. Thus, this journal has substantially
less of HERstory than HIStory, in terms of research participants and manuscript authors.
Using these data, we also ‘forecast’ when equal representation might be achieved (when
the number of female and male authors/participants at that time would be equal in
a given year). The predicted timelines to achieve this were: ~800 years for female
research participants, ~ 46 years for female participant studies, ~ 155 years for
female only participant studies, ~22 years for female and male authors, and ~ 13 years
for female and male first/last authors.
Keywords
Gender - authors - research participants - under-representation
