Women Are Only One Third of Participants in Exercise Science Studies Published in Major Journals

A new study presented recently at the annual meeting of the American Physiological Society in Long Beach, California, finds that the underrepresentation of women in research relating to exercise science is directly related to the small number of women scientists publishing in the field.

The study’s lead author, Jessica Linde, is a graduate student at Marquette University in Milwaukee. She holds a master’s degree in exercise physiology from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science from Eastern Washington University.

The authors examined articles published between 1991 and 2021 in three journals: the Journal of Applied Physiology, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, and the British Journal of Sports Medicine. They found that in 1991, more than half of the articles had research teams that were all men. By 2021, only 18 percent of all research papers were authored by all-male teams.

In 2021, only one third of all participants in studies published in these journals were women. But the authors found that when a man was the lead author of the study the level of women participants in the study was lower. When there was a woman lead author, survey participants tended to be equally divided between men and women. The research also found that the inclusion of more women on editorial boards also contributed to greater gender parity in research subjects in published research.

The authors conclude that “the low representation of women as participants in exercise science and physiology research could be resolved by encouraging authors who are men to research equitable numbers of each gender.”