Perpetuating gender inequity through uneven reporting

We welcome the Editorial on raising the profile of men’s health to reach gender equity and progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. To achieve these targets, scientific journals and researchers must urgently recognise and address the role they have in perpetuating gender inequity through uneven reporting of research.

We noticed skewed reporting of inequitable health outcomes in a report of the global burden of tuberculosis. In this comprehensive study, two-thirds of HIV-negative incident cases and deaths, and more than half of HIV-positive incident cases and deaths were in men. Yet, these critical findings were absent from the Summary, the Research in Context panel, and the Discussion, none of which mentions that being male was a major risk factor for tuberculosis. This oversight is inexplicable, particularly given The Lancet’s guidelines for authors to report sex-disaggregated data and discuss how sex and gender might affect study findings.