https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9729-6941
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Anastasia Novkunskaya, Vasily Kaleda, Artemy Okhotin, Challenges in the global workforce analysis, European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, Volume 67, Issue 3, March 2025, ezaf075, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejcts/ezaf075
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Dear Editor,
We read with great interest the article by Izumi et al. [1] and, first of all, would like to express our appreciation for the very attempt to address gender inequality in cardiac surgery worldwide. Colleagues have made an invaluable contribution to increasing the visibility of this problem, as well as to the discussion on economic and cultural backgrounds, which shape the gender ratio in this professional group. Being aware of all the possible challenges of such a large-scale comparison, we would nevertheless like to draw attention to some data inaccuracies at the country-specific level that affect the credibility of the article’s conclusions.
As an example, let us turn to the data on Russia as one of the cases of an upper-middle-income country group. Unfortunately, the official statistics within the country do not allow to estimate the proportion of women among cardiac surgeons and, thus, we do not attempt to argue against the general conclusion on gender inequality made by Izumi et al. Nevertheless, we would like to emphasize that the number of specialists in this case is underestimated by at least several times. Speaking of specific figures, we see that the appendix to the article lists overall 105 cardiac surgeons in Russia with just 6 women. Meanwhile, according to the official statistics of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation, there were 2519 cardiovascular surgeons in 2018 [2]. In 2023, at least 120 clinics performed 54 186 open-heart procedures across the country [3].
