In this episode of Michigan Minds, Reshma Jagsi, Newman Family Professor and Deputy Chair in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, explores the gender difference in research authorship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jagsi recently co-authored an article, “Meta-Research: COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected,” published in eLife Sciences, that delineates the findings of a study she and colleagues conducted examining the potential gender impact of COVID-19.

The pandemic resulted in school closings, which disrupted work and home life for many people, she says, but there were concerns among the research community that those disruptions might not have influenced men and women researchers equally.

Jagsi and her colleagues compared the gender distribution of authors on 1,893 medical papers related to the pandemic with that of papers published in the same journals in 2019.

“We estimated that the proportion of COVID-19-related papers that had a woman as the first author was 19 percent lower than that for papers published in the same journals in 2019, and women’s representation as first authors of COVID-19 research was particularly low for the papers that were published in March and April of 2020,” she says.

Hear more in this episode of Michigan Minds.