1 King’s College London, Department of Cancer Policy, Guy’s Hospital, Great Maze Pond, London SE1 9RT, UK grantlewison@aol.co,uk richard.sullivan@kcl.ac.uk

2 Evaluametrics Ltd, 157 Verulam Road, St Albans AL3 4DW, UK philip@evaluametrics.co.uk

3 University of Exeter, Medical School, South Cloisters, St Luke’s Campus, Exeter, EX1 2LU hcs253@gmail.com

Abstract

There is increasing pressure in most countries to encourage women to take an active part in research, and especially in health-related work that will be of benefit to the population. We wish to determine what progress has been made in the 20 Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in recent years. We examined the given names of the authors of biomedical research papers covered in the Web of Science (© Clarivate Analytics) in 2009 and 2019, before the effects of the COVID-19-related shutdown might have affected the results. Most of them could be sexed from our comprehensive thesaurus based on several web-based databases, notably Gender-API, provided that at least 75% of occurrences were of one sex. We were able to sex some 82% of MENA names in 2019, but only 75% in 2009 when the use of initials only was more common. Overall, the percentage of females rose from 32% in 2009 to 36% in 2019, but their presence was much greater for Tunisia and Algeria, Turkey and Iran, and much less for Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq. It was also higher for paediatrics (46% in 2019) and lower in cardiology (32%). We found that females were more often in first position among the paper authors than last (usually the most senior): the percentages rose from 30% to 43% for the former, and from 25% to 33% for the latter position. The mean contribution of females (fractional share of papers per person) was about 87% of that of males because on average they were more junior.

Dr Grant Lewison FRSA
Senior Research Fellow, King’s College London
School of Life Sciences and Medicine,
Guy’s Hospital, Great Maze Pond, London SE1 9RT

Director, Evaluametrics Ltd
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Ulle Must, Estonia
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Valentina Markusova
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