International Journal of Cardiovascular Sciences. 25/fev/2022;35(2):148-51.

Science Gender Gap: Are We in the Right Path?

Gláucia Maria Moraes de Oliveira , Marge Tenorio , Alessandra de Sá Earp Siqueira

DOI: 10.36660/ijcs.20220029

Women are entering the medical and scientific community in growing numbers, reaching and even surpassing their male counterparts in medical schools. However, a settled imbalance between men and women is still a reality in the international cardiology community despite these recent advances. The female presence in Brazilian medical schools was barely noticed until the 1960s; in the following years, there was a gradual increase in the number of women in the medical field, mainly in the first decade of the 21st century (59 % in 2020). In a 2020 demographic analysis of the Brazilian Federal Council of Medicine , men still predominated, accounting for 53.4% of all doctors in the country. Nevertheless, in the age-range below 30-years-old, women are the majority, accounting for 58.5%; the percentage of female doctors is inversely proportional to the increase in the age group, with only 21% of women in the age group above 70 years old.

In the USA, women represent less than 15% of the cardiology workforce and less than 5% of interventional cardiologists, while in Europe, women account for only one-third of cardiologists, and 18% of women are interventionists. Currently, Brazil has nearly 500 thousand doctors, 17,802 thousand cardiologists, of which 31.1% are females, and mostly concentrated in the southeast region. In 2018, only 215 (8.6%) of a total of 2,062 cardiovascular surgeons and 7.5% of 970 interventional cardiologists were women. The Brazilian Society of Cardiology had two female presidents; and the Cardiovascular Surgery Society, the Interventional Cardiology, and the Federation of Portuguese Language Cardiology Societies had one female president. Also, in the last five years, only one fifth of the speakers in the annual congress of the Brazilian Cardiology Society were women.

[…]