The gender gap in critical care as authors of medicine
The number of female doctors is increasing year by year which has led to overcoming the gender bias across the healthcare industry. However, there are some positive and negatives effects of this on the overall gender segregation with some specialties such as psychiatry becoming female dominant and traditionally male-dominated healthcare fields such as Intensive and Critical care still remaining as it is. Although there has been a substantial increase in women practicing critical care, they are heavily underrepresented in academic critical care medicine, as authors of scientific medicine and on clinical task force panels. This gender gap in critical care is due to the fact that the proportion of women serving as first or senior authors is lower and there is a clear visible bias in task force participant selection.
Women are under-represented in the field of ICM, according to data from several countries. ICM, for example, is a specialty in Canada with one of the lowest female representations (27.7%). (Canadian Medical Association 2018). Despite the fact that women make up the majority of medical graduates in Australia, there is yet to be a substantial rise in gender balance in ICM (Modra and Yong 2019). While diversity is often listed as an essential criterion for task forces by critical care societies, there is often little or no penalty for the absence of women or other historically underrepresented groups. One risk is that the chair or members of the executive committee select friends or colleagues rather than ensuring that the task force best represents the pool of experts for the issue at hand. This has led to the gender gap in critical care resulting in a lack of women in this section.
Despite this, women remain underrepresented in positions such as full professors in academic critical care medicine,
- Scientists who write research papers.
- International conference speakers
- Journalists who work as editors.
- Those who serve on scientific committees.
- Entrepreneurs and startup CEOs.
- Medical system engineers and designers
- Those who wrote the instructions.
- Panelists on task forces.
Is the gender gap in critical care medicine and ICM a concern? ICM is not designed to be gender friendly, which could have a significant effect on the discipline as the number of female doctors grows. Given the value of publication in both the advancement of medical careers and the advancement of medical research, the underrepresentation of female writers in academic medicine is cause for concern. This pattern has been characterized as "both a reflection and a source of women's under-representation and disadvantage in other areas of the scientific industry," resulting in a "vicious cycle" of decreased research funding and publication rates.
