A Handmaid's Tale: The Reproductive Bias in OB-GYN Science

This data is a supplementary to the paper "A Handmaid’s Tale: The reproductive bias in obstetric and gynecological science", whose abstract is included below. Feminist research has been claiming for decades that obstetrics and gynecological (OB-GYN) science and practice are biased towards reproduction. This bias means that women’s health is understudied in OB-GYN, and is often not the goal of this medical specialty practice; rather, successful reproduction is the goal and women as the clients of this profession are reduced to their reproductive role. To quantify this bias, we applied a deep learning topic model (BERTopic) on 305,063 PubMed abstracts published in 83 journals under the category OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and extracted over 2.5K topics. We then manually labeled the 1166 most prevalent topics and assigned each a topic category. Results show that 61% of articles in OB-GYN focus solely on women’s reproductive role. An additional 16% focus on gynecological cancer. All other women’s health issues account for only 23% of OB-GYN research. We discuss the underlying factors contributing to this Handmaid’s Tale in its OB-GYN version, including historical and current gender discrimination in healthcare and consistent vertical gender segregation of the OB-GYN profession. We then offer some routes for change.