[Increase of the proportion of women physicians published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine (1948-1998), stable proportion of male physicians]

Abstract

Objective: To determine the number of female authors in six volumes of the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (NTvG) and the number of physicians who contributed to at least one article in those volumes.

Design: Retrospective.

Method: We counted the number of articles in the NTvG in 10 different article categories in volumes 1948, 1958, 1968, 1978, 1988 and 1998. The number of authors and the sex and profession of the authors were registered. No author was counted more than once per volume. The results were compared with the number of physicians in the Netherlands in those years.

Results: In the first 4 volumes studied 3-5% of the total number of authors were female (n = 19; 22; 21; 16); this increased to 10 and 21% in 1988 (125) and 1998 (326). The percentage of female physicians who contributed to at least one article in one volume was 0.7% in 1948 (5) and 1958 (9), and increased to 1.0 (83) and 1.4% (211) in 1988 and 1998. The percentage of male physicians who contributed to at least one article fluctuated between 2.4 (471) and 3.1% (325) between 1958 and 1998. The mean number of authors per article increased from 1.2 in 1948 (354 articles) to 3.3 in 1998 (472 articles).

Conclusion: The number of female authors steadily increased in the past fifty years. The percentage of female physicians that contributed to at least one article in the NTvG doubled in the volumes investigated, while the percentage of male physicians remained stable.