1137 Trends of Women Neurosurgeon Publications in the United States

INTRODUCTION: The number of women neurosurgeons has increased steadily over the last decade and may result from improving access and mentoring. Previous analysis of gender differences did not clearly delineate the medical discipline of authors, making it difficult to correlate with changes in neurosurgical academia. Prior studies also did not consider that many neurosurgeons also publish in non-neurosurgery journals. METHODS: We analyzed gender differences in publications from a verified cohort of 8314 neurosurgeons in the American Board of Neurological Surgery database. We collected 180,343 articles published from 2010-2023 from 16 neurosurgery-specific journals and four high-impact, general, scientific and medical journals. A total of 7898 neurosurgeons were listed as first or last author among 26,488 of those publications. Authors’ gender was inferred using a verified algorithm. Trends of female first author and last authorship were revealed and predictive factors for women first authorship were identified, using a logistic regression model with publication year, journal name, and last author gender. RESULTS: An overall positive trend for the proportion of women first (Spearman correlation r = 0.93) and last authors (r = 0.92) was identified across the study period. Recency of publication year (odds ratio (OR) = 0.92, 95%CI: [0.9,0.93]), Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics (0.62,[0.39,1]), and women last author (0.51, [0.43,0.61]) were predictive of a woman neurosurgeon first author and Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery (2.43,[1.31,4.52]) and the journal, Spine (2.17,[1.07,4.39]), were predictive of a male first author. CONCLUSIONS: We found the number of women authoring neurosurgical publications increased from 2010 to 2023, mirroring demographic trends in the field. Furthermore, there seems to be journal-specific clustering, which could indicate sub-specialty demographics and also the influence of senior female mentors (last author) on more junior first author women neurosurgeons.