Women in contemporary cancer research

Despite recent advances, gender inequality persists in many scientific fields including medicine. Thus far, no study has extensively analyzed the gender composition of contemporary researchers in the oncology field. We examined 40 oncological journals (Web of Science, Oncology category) with different impact factors (Q1–Q4) and extracted all the articles and reviews published during 2015–2017 in order to identify the gender of their authors. Our data showed that women represent about 38% of all the authorships, both in articles and reviews. In relative terms, women are overrepresented as first authors of articles (43.8%), and clearly underrepresented as last or senior authors (<30%). This double pattern, also observed in other medical fields, suggests that age, or more specifically, seniority, may play some role in the gender composition of cancer researchers. Examining the pattern of collaboration, an interesting finding was observed: the articles signed by a woman in the first or in the last position roughly showed gender parity in the byline. We also found some differences in the content of the articles depending on which gender occupies the first and last positions of the authorships.