Analysis of gender diversity in health-related Systematic Reviews.

There is an increasing recognition of women's representation at work. However, there is still a gender gap in science that needs to be closed. Women come across with a glass ceiling in science mainly beyond graduate level, as women leave the academic track for reasons associated with socially-accepted gender-specific behavioural patterns. Generally, men are more likely to hold a prestigious authorship in a publication than women and a persistent bias in hiring, recognition and promotion, makes women's career path less linear than men's. Thus, the aim of this work is to analyse the gender composition of systematic reviews published throughout the last two years in the most recognised database of systematic reviews in the health field. Methods: We searched in Cochrane Database for Systematic Reviews for studies published between 01/07/2018 and 31/07/2020. Data was independently extracted by two reviewers. We calculated the proportion of authorships, odds ratio and prestige index and we show a Geographic distribution of publications by country. Results: 1139 papers were included, where 45% of all papers had more female than male authors, 57% of all papers had a female first author, 51% of studies had female correspondence authors and 40% of the sample had a female last author. Odds ratio showed that women have significantly higher chance to be first author or co-author, but significantly lower chance to hold a last authorship. Prestige index resulted to be -0.46. Finally, geographic representation from authors' countries affiliation showed that research publications mainly come from developed or upper-middle income countries. In conclusion, there is significant female leadership in healthcare systematic reviews, but work still needs to be done to reach gender balance, especially in terms of prestigious authorships.