Female authorship positions in health economic evaluations: a cross-sectional analysis

Objective: To investigate the gender of the authors who publish articles of health economic evaluations in medicine and healthcare journals.

Method: We evaluated a random sample of economic evaluations indexed in MEDLINE during 2019. Gender of the first, last and corresponding author was determined by review of the author's first name. Data were summarized as frequency and percentage for categorical items and median and interquartile range (IQR) for continuous items. We also calculated the index of authors per paper.

Results: We included 200 studies with 1365 authors (median of 6 authors per paper; IQR: 4-9). Gender identification was possible for all authors in the study sample: 802 (59%) were men and 563 (41%) were women. The number of female first, last, and corresponding authors respectively were 78 (39%), 68 (34%), and 80 (40%) for health economic evaluations.

Discussion: Female scientists were underrepresented as co-authors and in prominent authorship positions in health economic evaluations. This study serves as a call to action for the scientific community to actively work towards equity and inclusion.