Vaccine, hoaxes and other doubts about covid: this is how 5 experts from Aragon respond
Augusts 31, 2020
Between the softball diamond and the cancer research laboratory
September 1, 2020
It was a suspicion that is now confirmed with data. International studies reveal that in the global health crisis, women are doing less research, also on the coronavirus itself. This setback in gender equality has important implications for the advancement of science. Among the reasons are inequality in the burden of care and in the distribution of leadership.
When Spain declared a state of alarm on March 14 and much of the research went on pause, the laboratory of Núria Montserrat, an Icrea researcher at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), was one of the few that continued operating. In mid-February, after returning from Naples from a conference, and just the weekend in which the epidemic had broken out in Lombardy, he decided to park the projects he had underway and put “some of the best hands in the laboratory” to work already in covid.
Then, when confinement arrived, he locked himself in a 70-square-meter apartment in Barcelona with three young children and co-led international research to identify drugs capable of blocking SARS-CoV-2 using cell cultures and mini-kidneys, miniature replicas of kidneys. that this researcher develops in her laboratory.
“They were weeks of absolute madness, of combining childcare with my partner, school at home, work, housework, sleeping four hours. I think I have aged five years,” says Montserrat, who warns: “Let no one think that this is teleworking or a sustainable model. I have experienced important moments of crisis and even one of my collaborators 'freaked out' because he couldn't take it anymore.”
The situation that Montserrat narrates is probably more than familiar to any academic with small children, although especially to women. And the Catalan researcher is an exception, because she has managed to continue researching and publishing, something that many other scientists have had to give up in these months.
"Confinement has widened the gender gap in science: only one in three authors who publish articles related to SARS-CoV-2 are women"
This was pointed out at the beginning of the pandemic by various preliminary studies that began to point out a marked decline in female scientific productivity compared to that of men, in all areas and especially in the emerging coronavirus. And then, the latest published works have put figures to those first suspicions and have confirmed that confinement has widened the gender gap in science: only one in three authors who publish articles related to SARS-CoV-2 are women.
This was revealed in May by research from the George Institute for Global Health at the University of Oxford based on a systematic PubMed review of nearly 1.500 articles and 6.500 authors on covid, which found that women represent 34% of authorship. . The percentage drops to 29% for first authors, who tend to be young researchers; and 26% for last — a position usually occupied by the seniors who direct the work.
Fewer women leading covid research
“Women are underrepresented and have been for a long time, if not since the beginning of science, despite efforts to raise awareness about the importance of achieving gender equality,” states Ana-Catarina Pinho-Gomes, leader of this work published in 'BMJ Global Health'.
“Due to confinement and the situation imposed by the pandemic, women are doing less research in all areas,” she points out, and specifies that Africa is where this representation of women was lowest, while Oceania had the highest.
In another recent article published in 'eLife', an international team of researchers, led by the University of Michigan (USA), reviewed 1.893 studies on covid published between January and June. They compared the results with the 85.373 studies published in the same journals during 2019 and observed that the percentage of first authors had decreased by 14%. The difference was more pressing in March and April, when the percentage of first authors was 23% lower than the same period in 2019.
