Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
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The British honours system is one of the oldest in the world rewarding individuals, including those of the medical profession. The authors were interested to see if any particular specialty was honoured to a greater extent. We aimed to establish the number of those honoured, the duration of clinical practice involved, as well as additional factors. ⋯ The most honoured specialty was General Practice. However, when corrected for total subspecialty population, the number one ranking specialty was Public Health Medicine. Academic clinicians are well represented. The findings may be of interest to the medical community.
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Gender bias has been found in medical literature, with more men than women as first or senior authors of papers, despite about half of doctors being women. Nursing is about 90% female, so we aimed to determine if similar biases exist in nursing literature. ⋯ Eight journals qualified for entry, three from the United Kingdom, four from the United States of America, and one from Australia. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Using Chi-square and Fisher exact tests, we determined differences between the numbers of men and women across all the journals, between countries (USA, UK and Australia), changes over the 30 years, and changes within journals over time. RESULTS Despite the small proportion of men in the nursing workforce, up to 30% of first authors were men. UK journals were more likely to have male authors than USA journals, and this increased over time. USA journals had proportions of male first authors consistent with the male proportion of its nursing workforce. CONCLUSIONS In the UK (though not in the USA) gender bias in nursing publishing exists, even though the nursing workforce is strongly feminized. This warrants further research, but is likely to be due to the same reasons for the gender gap in medical publishing; that is, female nurses take time out to have families, and social and family responsibilities prevent them taking opportunities for career progression, whereas men's careers often are not affected in such ways.