Aliya Rashid, DO, MPH, on Further Research With Gender Inequality in CAR T Paper Authorship

“I was looking into the percentage of women that are entering the field of medicine. And you know, from [2023] it sounds like it's about 60% of incoming medical students are women and 40% are men. So, I feel like there's already been a shift and more and more women are going into medicine. But I'd be interested in seeing, does that translate into fellowship and specializing, and then going on to being an attending or a professor and a lead author for a clinical trial?”

Recent research has revealed that over 70% of authors were male and less than 30% were female out of the 13 pivotal trials that led to the approval of multiple chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies between 2017-2022 for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), lymphoma, and myeloma. These findings, out of a group at the University of Kansas Medical Center, were presented in a poster at the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, held December 9-12, in San Diego, California.

CGTLive spoke with study coauthor Aliya Rashid, DO, MPH, internal medicine resident physician, University of Kansas Medical Center, to learn more about further research that she is interested in conducting with gender inequality in medicine. She shared that there seems to be a positive trend in improved gender equality in authorship and medicine in general, but this must be looked into further to see how deep the change is really penetrating. She also shared what she was excited about from the ASH meeting.

Click here to read more coverage of ASH 2023.

REFERENCE
Khaliq A, Wesson W, Logan E, et al. The glass wall: Gendered authorship disparities in in CD 19 and BCMA CAR-T clinical trials for lymphoma and myeloma. Presented at: ASH 2023 Annual Meeting & Exposition. December 9-12; San Diego, CA. Abstract #2344