Male Scientists ‘More Positive About Medical Research’

Men working in the life science industry are more likely to be positive about their achievements than their female counterparts.

This is according to a new article published in The British Medical Journal (BMJ), which looked at more than 100,000 studies between 2002 and 2017.

First author Marc J Lerchenmueller, assistant professor at the University of Mannheim in Germany and of Yale University School of Management, wrote: “We found that articles in which the first and last author were both women were significantly less likely to use positive terms to describe research findings compared with articles in which the first and/or last author was a man.”

It was added: “Gender differences in the positive presentation of research findings were largest in high impact journals.”

Health Exec reported the findings, which showed 12.1 per cent of all clinical trials and 11.7 per cent of life science articles used one or more of 25 positive words.

The positive word that was most included most often was ‘novel’, which was used 59.2 per cent more frequently with male-authored research compared with female-produced work.

In addition to this, ‘unique’ was used 43.8 per cent more by male authors, while ‘promising’ was utilised 72 per cent more frequently by men.

Additionally, authors have become more optimistic over the years, with positive wording having increased by 80 per cent between 2002 and 2017, rising from nine per cent to 16.9 per cent.

There could be more articles with positive words in them in the future, as investment into early-stage ventures in the life science sector is set to increase to £2.8 million, according to BioCity.

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