Five years on, NO PROGRESS: the gender equity crisis in sport and exercise medicine publishing persists – action is now overdue

Gender inequity in sport and exercise medicine (SEM)1 publishing is stagnating and not improving. In 2023, our British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) paper2 called for affirmative action to halt gender inequity in SEM/physiotherapy publishing. Our analysis (manually collated) revealed stark under-representation of women as authors—just one in three first or last authors was a woman, while a mere 10% of study participants were women. Despite a decade passing, we found little had changed between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, exposing a troubling inertia within academic publishing.