Author gender bias in paediatric journals and FOAM

Women are disproportionately underrepresented within medical aca-demia. 1 This gender bias has wide-reaching consequences, negatively impacting employment, promotion, and pay. Paediatric academia is an important area to investigate publication gender bias as women account for the greatest proportion of the clinical workforce in the United Kingdom. 2 Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) is a novel and expanding method of communicating best practice and research findings. FOAM refers to blogs, podcasts, websites, applications and other freely available resources used for medical education. Given its accessibility for potential authors, removal of funding needs and independence from large institutions , FOAM may be less subject to gender bias than traditional publishing methods.

We, as a group of medical students who frequently use FOAM, collaborated with two paediatricians who develop FOAM resources, in order to assess and discuss the extent of gender bias in paediatric FOAM. Our team is actively working towards gender equality in medicine, most notably through Dr Knight's work as co-founder of Women Speakers in Healthcare and founder of www.paedi atric foam.com. To our knowledge, there is no previously published work investigating gender bias within FOAM. FOAM's novel nature provides a unique opportunity to recognise, assess and tackle potential gender bias before FOAM becomes more institutionalised. To this end, we conducted a study collecting data on author gender within paediatric peer-reviewed and FOAM sources.

Read more here: https://asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tct.13365