(P268) TRENDS IN WOMEN EDITORIAL AUTHORSHIP IN CARDIOTHORACIC SURGERY JOURNALS BETWEEN 2018 - 2022

Background: Women have historically been underrepresented in leadership positions and academia in cardiothoracic surgery, impeding career advancement and limiting role models for trainees. Publications are often seen as an academic success metric, and invited editorials represent the recognition of expertise of the invited physician in the cardiothoracic surgery field. This study aimed to identify current trends in gender disparity of authors of invited editorials published in cardiothoracic surgery journals over a five-year period.

METHODS AND RESULTS: We performed an analysis of editorials published across 16 major cardiothoracic surgery journals from January 2018 to October 2022. We searched each journal’s website individually and identified articles classified specifically as editorials. Articles classified as invited commentaries, letters to the editor, review articles and other forms of invited articles that were not explicitly deemed editorials by the journal were excluded from this review. Author gender was estimated using a validated tool (Genderize.io) with verification using institutional profiles. The proportion of women first, senior and total number of women authors were calculated for each journal and year. Linear regressions were used to assess the association between year and the number of women authors, woman first authors, and woman senior authors.

In total, 806 editorials were published over the five-year period with a total of 1,858 authors (16% women, n=293). The majority were published by authors from the United States (45%), India (9%) and Germany (8%). The percentage of women first authors increased between 2018 and 2022, with 9% in 2018 (n=21), 9% in 2019 (n=13), 17% in 2020 (n=30), 16% in 2021 (n=26), and 21% in 2022 (n=23). A similar trend was seen in women senior authorship (6% in 2018; 7% in 2019; 14% in 2020; 16% in 2021; 17% in 2022) and the percentage of all-women authors (9% in 2018; 12% in 2019; 18% in 2020; 17% in 2021; 20% in 2022). The linear regressions revealed that there was an average increase of 2.64-woman authors per year total, 3.36 women first authors and 2.98 women senior authors, overall.

Conclusion: Despite the fact that women authorship in editorials has steadily increased over the past five years (p < 0.0001), women still represent less than a quarter of authors in every metric measured, highlighting the critical gap in gender equity. Several factors may contribute to this underrepresentation, however, advocating for gender equity and providing support to women surgeons remain key factors to eliminate this gap.