A new study from scholars at Pennsylvania State University has analyzed women’s representation among authors of articles published in the Journal of Biomechanics over the past five decades, finding notable progress in closing the field’s gender gap.
The research team analyzed the gender of the journal’s published authors in one year for each decade, beginning in 1970 through 2020. In total, the team identified the gender of the authors of 1,490 articles. In 1970, women represented only 5.5 percent of all authors. By 2020, their share increased to 26.5 percent. Furthermore, the share of women in the first or last author position grew substantially from 4.9 percent in 1970 to 43.3 percent in 2020.
In addition to author gender, the researchers also examined the gender and number of participants included in each study. In the studies that reported their participants gender, in 1980, only 9.5 percent had exclusively women participants and just 38.1 percent had both men and women participants. In 2020, these figures grew to 11.0 percent and 65.9 percent, respectively.