Women in clinical autonomic research and the autonomic societies : how far have we come in thirty years?

To determine the involvement of women as authors of articles published in Clinical Autonomic Research we determined the number and percentages of published articles with (i) at least one female author, (ii) at least one male author, (iii) a female first author, and (iv) a female last author, which typically represents the senior or lead author. To achieve an overview of the changes in representation over the 30 years since the journal’s inception, we arbitrarily focused on six specific years selected at 5-year intervals: 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019. We also included data from 2020 due to reports on the disproportionately negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in science [11, 14]. For each year, metrics were quantified for all articles combined, as well as for different article types: original research, editorials, reviews, and ‘other’ (including letters to the editor, short communications, case studies, tributes, guest lectures, meeting reports). We also determined the number of men and women in leadership positions for the following boards and societies: Clinical Autonomic Research editorial board (1991–2020), AAS board of directors (1992–2020), the EFAS council (1998–2020), and ISAN executive committee (1997–2019). Membership data were requested for all three main autonomic societies, but were only available for the AAS (1996–2020). We used the term “gender” because we are investigating gender-based disparities within a sociocultural context. We recognise that gender is not binary and is self-identified, but had to use assigned binary terms (“women/female” and “men/male”) because of the limited information available. We assigned gender as follows: (i) based on self-identification in society membership lists, or use of a gendered prefix (Mr., Mrs., Ms.); (ii) based on an internet search using the author’s name and institutional affiliation, with gender determination based on pronoun usage (e.g., she/he), gender noted on their institutional web page, or clinician listing websites; and, (iii) based on their photograph, typical gender association with the first name, or knowledge of the individual through professional acquaintance. For two AAS members and authors of one publication, gender could not be reasonably determined and so they were excluded.