Arq. Bras. Cardiol. 2022; 119(6): 968-969

The First Step

Paolo Blanco Villela

DOI: 10.36660/abc.20220807

This Short Editorial is referred by the Research article "Gender Disparity in First and Senior Authorship in Brazilian Cardiology Journals".

George Eliot and George Sand, 19th-century novelists, were pen names for Mary Ann Evans and Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, respectively. In common, two women who, to achieve recognition for their texts, used male names in their works, as portrayed by Nodari in his article published in 2021. Far beyond historical knowledge, analyzing gender disparity in scientific production transcends literature and must be understood as the result of a process of formation and development of society. The patriarchal, white model with financial privileges is unquestionable, which, combined with a vision of the “man with reason and the woman with emotion”, helped to build the model of science that, in a wrong way, kept women away from the scientific field.

To think of this model as something belonging to the past is inadequate. Data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2019 exposes a social reality that reflects on the formation of the scientist. Women spend twice as much time on housework per week compared to men of the same age group (21.4 versus 11 hours), earn less than their male peers (77% of male income), and in those aged between 25 and 49 years old who live in the same household with a child up to three years old, the percentage of insertion in the labor market is lower than that of men in the same situation (59.6% versus 89.2%).

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