Gender disparity within academic Canadian urology

Abstract

Introduction: Increasing female matriculation into medical school has shown an increase in women training in academic urology, but gender disparity still exists within this male-dominated field. This study aims to evaluate publication productivity and rank differences of Canadian female and male academic urologists. Methods: The Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS) was used to compile a list of 12 Canadian accredited urology programs. Using each institution’s website, faculty members’ names, genders, academic positions, and leadership ranks were noted. SCOPUS© was consulted to tabulate the number of documents published, citations, and h-index of each faculty member. To account for temporal bias associated with the h-index, the m-quotient was also computed. Results: There was a significantly higher number of men (164, 88.17%) among academic faculty than women (22, 11.83%). As academic rank increased, the proportion of female urologists decreased. Overall, male urologists had higher academic ranks, h-index values, number of publications, and citations (p=0.038, p=0.0038, p=0.0011, and p=0.014, respectively). There was an insignificant difference between men and women with respect to their m-quotient medians (p=0.25). Conclusions: There is an increasing number of women completing residency in urology, although there are disproportionally fewer female urologists at senior academic positions. Significant differences were found in the h-index, publication count, and citation number between male and female urologists. When using the m-quotient to adjust for temporal bias, no significant differences were found between the gender in terms of academic output.