  Preliminary evidence suggests that women, including female researchers, are
disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of unequal
distribution of childcare, elderly care and other kinds of domestic and
emotional labor. Sudden lockdowns and abrupt shifts in daily routines have
disproportionate consequences on their productivity, which is reflected by a
sudden drop in research output in biomedical research, consequently affecting
the number of female authors of scientific publications. We investigate the
proportion of male and female researchers who published scientific papers
during the COVID-19 pandemic, using bibliometric data from biomedical preprint
servers and selected Springer-Nature journals. Our findings document a decrease
in the number of publications by female authors in biomedical field during the
global pandemic. This effect is particularly pronounced for papers related to
COVID-19, indicating that women are producing fewer publications related to
COVID-19 research. This sudden increase in the gender gap is persistent across
the ten countries with the highest number of researchers. These results should
be used to inform the scientific community of the worrying trend in COVID-19
research and the disproportionate effect that the pandemic has on female
academics.
