Gender disparities among prestigious biomedical award recipients in Japan: A cross sectional study

INTRODUCTION The limited inclusion of women in medical and biomedical research has been a long-standing global issue.1 Gender and racial inequity continue to pervade contemporary society, including domains such as in leadership positions,2–5 remunerations,6 research publication citations,7 and professional awards.8,9 The gender gap has been observed in the number of original papers,7,10 which is an important indicator for evaluating performance, and the proportion of women first author is lower in women scientists.10 Moreover, opportunities for women scientists to present and gain recognition at academic conferences have been limited,11 and a similar gender gap has also been reported in the chance of obtaining grants.12,13 Accumulating these gaps may result in a lower proportion of women in the professional awards. Historically in Japan, the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society enacted in 1999 has provided milestones and general guidelines for promoting gender equity in society, including academia. The primary criteria delineated by each foundation are as follows: the Takeda Prize for Medical Science is awarded to researchers with outstanding achievements in basic or clinical fields of medicine; the Uehara Prize is awarded to researchers with outstanding achievements in the life sciences, especially in fields related to health promotion, disease prevention, and treatment; the Keio Medical Science Prize is awarded to researchers with outstanding achievements in medicine and various fields of life science closely related to medicine. Over the last decade (2014 to 2023), 3.8% (2/53) of women comprised the three-award recipients, which is less than the proportion receiving doctoral degrees 28 years ago in 1995 (15.6%) in Japan.22 DISCUSSION Findings We discovered striking gender gap in which the proportion of women receiving any of the three prestigious medical and biomedical science awards remained zero until 2015. [...]women comprised only 1.1% (2/182) of scientists who received the prestigious awards，compared to 7.8% (31/397) of Lasker Award recipients,15 while academic age of three awards recipients in Japan (Table 1) were comparable to the reported 30 years for Lasker Award recipients.15 Considering that 11.1% of the Keio Medical Science Prizes awarded to international researchers were women, there are potentially unique circumstances within the Japanese scientific community that contribute to this stark gender gap.