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The first signs of a sex imbalance were seen in the overwhelmingly male line-ups of experts speaking about covid-19 and the poor representation of women on government pandemic advisory panels 12 Meanwhile journals, including The BMJ and our specialty journals, have seen a worrying drop in the proportion of female first authors of research papers All the more reason to mourn another casualty of the pandemic: the tie-up between funding from the UK’s National Institutes of Health Research (NIHR) and advances in sex equality 3 Since its inception in 2011 the Athena SWAN initiative has had a substantial effect on the proportion of grants going to female researchers and their teams, say Pavel Ovseiko and colleagues Because of the way women tend to operate, this has meant research that is more multidisciplinary, rigorous, relevant, and honest 4 Sadly, there is no guarantee that these positive trends will be sustained now that the NIHR’s incentives have been dropped, says Sarah Stewart-Brown,5 and there is a mountain to climb before women achieve anything like equality in academia’s top leadership positions “When deciding whom to listen to in the covid-19 era, we should respect those who respect uncertainty, and listen in particular to those who acknowledge conflicting evidence on even their most strongly held views,” say George Davey Smith and colleagues 6 To help people face up to the “known unknowns” of the pandemic, The BMJ has joined forces with these authors in hosting a one day international meeting on 20 November
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