Research on the science of sport is heavily skewed towards male athletes, finds a review of hundreds of sports-medicine studies1. The imbalance leaves large gaps in knowledge about female sports and sport-related injuries. Researchers reviewed 669 studies published between 2017 and 2021 in six leading sports-science journals. They wanted to put some numbers to their observations that there were many more studies on male sports compared with female sports. 'We wanted to quantify these discrepancies in the current sports-medicine research to show that there is a need for female-athlete centred research, especially as we continue to learn how females experience different injuries than males across many sports,' says co-author Meghan Bishop, a surgeon at the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Just 9% of the studies focused exclusively on female athletes, whereas 71% focused only on male athletes. 'While stark, these results were not particularly surprising,'...
learn more
